

jylLini 



THE TKUE 



THE BEAIJTIETJL 



liiitnre, |.rt, Binrals, nnit 'EEligiiin, 



SELECTED /FROM THE WORKS OF 

JOHN EUSKIN, A.M., 

AUTHOR OF "MODKEN PAINTERS," "STONES OP VENICE," "POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ABT,' 

ETC., ETC. 



WITH A NOTICE OF THE AUTHOR, 

Mrs. L. G. TUTHTLL, 

AUTHOR OF " mSTOKY OF AKOniTECTUEB," " THE ARTIST," ETC. 



,' ^ 



THIKD EDITION. 



XEW YORK : 

JOHN WILEY 

ISGO. 



e, 






ll)7 



i^ 



Entoi\'d according to Act of Confess, in the year 1855, by 

WILEY & HALSTED, 

In the Clerk's Office of tlie District Court of the United States for the Sou:ben 
District of New York. 



K. CRAIGHEAD, 

Primer, Slereotyper, and Eleclrotyper, 
ffiaxttiii 93uiltiiM(j, 

81, 83, ai\d 85 Cenlre s.reet. 



-J^ 



CONTENTS. 



I. 

PAQB 

TUK PERCEPTIOiSr OF THE BeAUTIFUL. 

^' Perfect Taste, 4 

/ Taste as distinguished from Judgment, 4. 

Cultivation of Taste, 5 

Typical Beauty. 

Infinity, 8 

Unity, . 11 

Repose, 13 

Symmetry, 17 

Purity, 18 

Moderation, 20 

/ Vital Beauty, 

Evidences of Happiness in the Organic Creation, .... 24 

Healthy vital energy in Plants, . 25 

Beauty in Animals, 25 

Human Beauty, 27 

The Operation of the Mind upon the Body, 29 

Passions which mar Human Beauty, 31 

The Ideal, 34 

The Beauty of Repose and Felicity, how consistent with the Ideal, 35 

Ideality predicable of all living creatures, 36 

t Purity of Taste, . . . 36 



VI 



CONTENTS. 



IL 



The Sky. 

The peculiar adaptation of the Sky to the pleasing and teaching of 

Man, 42 

The carelessness with which its lessons are received, . . . 4y 

Many of our ideas of the Sl<y altogether conventional, ... 43 
The idea of God's immediate presence impressed upon us by the 

Sky, . 44 

Clouds. 

Variation of their character at different elevations, . . 45 

Extent of tlie upper cloud region, ....... 45 

Characteristics of tlie upper Clouds, 46 

"Wordsworth's description of these Clouds, 47 

The central Cloud region, . 49 

The Clouds of Salvator and Poussin, 49 

Clouds as seen from an isolated Mountain, .... 52 

Sunset in Tempest, 53 

Serene Midnight, 53 

Sunrise on the Alps, 54 

Rain Clouds, 54 

Marked difference in color, 55 

Value to the Painter of the Rain Cloud, 56 

The intense blue of the Sky after rain, 56 

The Campagna of Rome after a storm, ..... 57 

Typical Beauty as perceived by the Greeks in Nature, . . 58 
The evanescent beauties of Nature, . . . . . .58 

The Campagna of Rome by evening light, 59 

Wateii. 

The functions and agency of Water, 60 

Effect of Sea after a prolonged storm, 60 

The "yesty waves," 60 

Rivers lean to one side, 61 

Falling water. The Fall of Schaffhausen, 63 

Pond by the road side, 63 

The interrupted stream, 64 

The continuous stream, 65 

The elevations of the Earth the cause of the perpetual flow of "Water, 66 

The irregular waves of the sea, 63 

Mountains. 

The dry land appears at the fiat of the Almighty, .... 69 

This was a command that the eartli should be sculptured, . 69 



CONTENTS. 



vu 



The manner and time uncertain, G9 

The Hills are the Earth's action ; the Plains its rest, ... 73 

Mountains are the bones of the Earth, 73 

Forms of Mountains, how modified by snow, .... 74 

The works of the Great Spirit deep and unapproachable, . . 75 

The color of Mountains 76 

Mountain flowers, . 76 

The use of Mountains, 77 



b. Maintain a constant change in the currents of air, 

c. Change the soils of the Earth, 

The influence of the higher Mountains, 

Fribourg in Switzerland, 

Ascent of the Montanvert from tlie valley of Chamouni, 

The glaciers, . 

Is this the Earth's prime, or is it only the wreck of Paradise ? 
Influence of natural scenery on character, .... 
Poetical influence of HiUs and Mountains, . . . . 



77 
77 
79 
81 
84 
85 
87 
91 
92 



Mountain gloom, . 92 

Fertility succeeds destruction, 96 

Consecrated Mountains, 98 

Deaths of Aaron and Moses, 99 

The Mount of Transfiguration, 103 



Trees. 

Laws common to aU forest trees, . 

Care of Nature to conceal uniformity, . 

Characters of natural leafage. 

Termination of Trees in sj'mmetrical curves. 

Gracefulness of Trees in plains. 

The Pine Tree as described by Shakspeare, 

The Olive Tree, 



Grass. 

The Meadow Grass, .... 
Symbolical of humility and cheerfulness. 
The utility of Grass, 



106 
107 
107 
108 
109 
110 
111 



113 
114 
115 



III. 

!HrrIiitBrto. 



Architecture. 

Considered as a Fine Art, 

The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 



121 
121 



vm 



CONTENTS. 



The Lamp of Sacrifice, 

The Lamp of Truth, . 

The Lamp of Power, . 

The Lamp of Beauty, . 

The Lamp of Life, 

The Lamp of Memory, 

The Lamp of Obedience, 

European Architecture derived through Greece and Rome, 

Doric and Corinthian Orders, .... 

The work of tlie Lombards in Architecture, . 

Venice, 

Commercial interest at first the highest aim of Venice, 

The Venice of modern fiction, .... 

Venice restored from its ruins, .... 

The islands on which the city was built, 

St. Mark's, 

The interior of the Church, 

The nobleness and sacredness of color, . 

Gothic Architecture, ...... 

Characteristics or Moral Elements of the Gothic, 
Savagoness, ....... 

The Grotesque, ...... 

Contrast between Northern and Southern countries, 
Gothic windows and roofs, .... 

The Gothic in Domestic Architecture, 

The Renaissance, ....... 

Early Renaissance, ...... 

Effect of tlie sudden enthusiasm for classic architecture, 
The use of marble in Architecture, .... 



PAOR 

122 
125 
126 
130 
138 
140 
143 
147 
148 
148 
148 
149 
151 
152 
153 
154 
156 
158 
164 
166 
166 
168 
ITS 
174 
176 
178 
178 
181 
182 



IV. 
IrttljitnrL 

Sculptors of Egypt and Nineveh, 187 

Natural forms suitable for Sculpture, 188 

The uses to which Sculpture has been perverted, . . . .191 

The Torso of the Vatican, 198 

Michael Angelo, 199 

Bandinelli and Canova, 200 

The Laocoon, 20C 

No herculean form spiritual, ....... 204 

Michael Angelo's snow statue, 206 

How are we to get our men of genius ? 208 



V. 

PAGE 

Characteristics of greatness of style, . . . . . . .213 

1. Clioice of noble subject, 213 

2. Love of Beauty, 214 

3. Sincerity, 218 

4. Invention, 219 

Historical Painting, 221 

Hunt's Liglit of the World, . . 223 

Toetical Painting, 223 

The ideal, .... 226 

The uses and abuses of imagination, ....... 227 

Compositions, ........... 229 

Raphael's Cartoon of the Charge to Peter, 231 

Raphael's influence injmious to Christian Art, 232 

The Transfiguration, 232 

The histories of the Bible yet to be painted, 236 

Illustrated Bible, 238 

Distinctive qualities in the minds of artistfj, 242 

Painting valuable as the vehicle of thought, 244 

Ideas of Power, 244 

Ideas of Imitation, 245 

Ideas of Truth, 246 

Ideas of Beauty, 248 

Ideas of Relation, 249 

Burke's Theory of the Sublime, 250 

The truths of Nature, 251 

Anecdote from Mrs. Jameson, 252 

All repetition blamable, 253 

Color less important than form, 254 

Landscape Painting, 255 

Titian and Tintoret, 261 

The modern Italians, 261 

The Flemish School, 263 

Cliiaroscuro, 265 

Tintoret's Massacre of the Innocents, 268 

Tintoret's Baptism of Christ, 270 

Tlio Ideal of Humanity, 271 

Color, 271 

A Sunset on the Campagna of Rome, 273 

Contrasted with an English sunset, 273 

Portrait painting, . 275 

Taste for uufuiished works, 277 

* 



X CONTENTS. 

FAGB 

Who decides on the merit of a picture ? . . • . . .280 

Eeynolds's principles contrary to his practice, 283 

A knowledge of rules cannot make a Painter, 283 

Anecdote of Haydn the Musician, 284 

Great men choose historical subjects from the age in wliich they live, . 287 

Imaginary portraits, 288 

Portrait of the Duke of Wellington 293 

Copying from the antique, 294 

Decorating Schools with pictures, ....... 295 

Want of knowledge of the value of Paintings, . . . * . 299 

Loss of valuable pictures, 300 

The kinds of knowledge indispensable for an artist, .... 302 



VI. 



"^MiVi, 



Distinction between a poetical and a historical statement, . . . 307 

Byron's Lake of Geneva, 308 

What is poetry ? 310 

The functions of the imagination, 314 

Combination, ........... 314 

Composition 314 

Analysis, 314 

Action between the moral feelings and the imagination, . . . 320 

Imagination fed by external nature, 321 

The supernatural, 322 

Manifestations of spiritual being, ........ 323 

The Greeks could not conceive of a spirit, 324 

Bacon and Pascal, 326 

Shakspcare's universal grasp of human nature, 327 

No mountain passions were to be allowed in him, .... 328 

Proofs of Shakspeare's greatness, 332 

Pastoral poetry, 334 

Walton's Angler, 335 

Sterne's Sentimental Journey, 336 

Mrs. Radcliflfe and Rousseau, 337 

Scott's Lady of the Lake, 337 

Shelley and Wordsworth, 337 

Walter Scott, 338 

The representative of the mind of the age in literature, .... 338 

The tests of a truly great man, 338 

The faults of the age, 343 



CONTENTS. XI 

PAOB 

Scott's enjoyment of Nature, 347 

His love of color, 353 

The power of the masters shown by their sell auuiliilation, . . . 361 

Two orders of Poets, 361 

Keats's description of a wave, 362 

Dante and Homer, . . 362 

" La Toilette de Constance," by de la Vigne, 366 

Comparison between Pope and "Wordsworth, 370 

The Jessy of iShenstone, 371 

The Juno and Diana of the Greeks, 373 

The Greeks' view of Nature, . . • 375 

Taste in Literature and Art, . . . . . . . .377 

Books recomn-cnded, 378 



VII. 



Natural imagery of the Bible, 383 

Prejudices against the love of Nature, 386 

Love of Nature associated with wilfulness and faithlessness, . . . 387 

The Sermon on the Mount 388 

RaUroads and telegraphs, 390 

Utopianism, 393 

The use of scientific pursuits, , . 396 

Falsehood, 396 

No falsity harmless, , 397 

The want of Faith in Christendom, 398 

Romanist and Puritan, 399 

Disdain of Beauty in Man, 400 

Utilitarians, .401 

The Spirit of Prophecy, * . 401 

The duty of Delight, ........ .402 

A Yoice ot W iming, 403 

Noble^ims, 403 

Influence of the Fall of Man, 404 

All have gifts, various in degree and kind, 405 

Gratitude for the deeds of the living, 406 

Intemperance, 406 

Tradesmen ought to be gentlemen, ....... 407 

Why is one man richer than another? . 408 

" Special Providences," 412 



XU CONTENTS. 

PAGB 

Natural admiration, . 414 

Romance as generally imderstood, .415 

True meaning of tlie word Romantic, . 415 

Tlie difficulties in the way of doing good, 418 

Tlie economy of dress, 419 

What are luxuries? 424 

Pride of knowledge, 426 

Tlie Divine Being as a Father and a Friend, ... . 428 

Fitness for a special work essential to happiness, 429 

Limited views of Patriotism, 436 

The perfect Mistress of a Household, 437 

Modern development through Science, 437 

Early Christianity, 439 

Teaching of the Beatitudes, . 441 

Modern Infidelity, 442 

Pulpits and Sermons, ■ . . 443 

Modern Education, 446 

What should a man entering into life accurately know? . . 446 

Modern Education despises Natural History, .... 447 

Modem Education despises Religion, 448 

The Holy Comforter, 461 



PREFACE. 



A Preface need not, as a matter of course, be an apology. 
Fet, an apology would be offered for "Selections" from. 
Ruskin's Works, were those valuable works accessible to 
readers in general. Being voluminous and expensive, they are 
beyond the means of many who could appreciate and highly 
enjoy them. Moreover, some of the topics discussed are 
merely local (English), and not specially interesting to the 
American public. A rich field, however, remains, from which 
these selections have been carefully culled, and methodically 
arranged to form a book complete in itself. For the choice 
and arrangement alone, is the Editor responsible ; the Author 
speaks for himself. 

L. C. T. 

Peinceton, N. J. 



NOTICE 



JOHN EUSKIN AND HIS WORKS 



Although novelty is generally a source of pleasure, yet what 
is new sometimes meets with opposition, merely because it is 
new. 

About twenty years ago a book apjjeared in London, entitled, 
" Modern Painters : By a Graduate of Oxford ;" the main 
object of which was, to vindicate the reputation of the land- 
scape-painter Turner, whose pictures had been ruthlessly 
assaUed by the Reviewers. 

The author confesses that the book originated " in indigna- 
tion at the shallow and false criticism of the j)eriodicals of the 
day on the works of the great living artist." 

And who was the presumptuous " Graduate," who thus threw 
down the gauntlet, and defied the mighty host of Reviewers ? 
A young man unknown to fame ! A mere fledgeling from the 
University ! 

Yet in his book there was a bold originality, an uncom- 
promising independence, quite startling to the lovers of the 



XVI NOTICE OF JOUN EUSKIN AND HIS WORKS. 

old, beaten track — the devotees to precedent. The daring 
champion of Turner, not contented with asserting the painter's 
claims to universal admiration, announced, somewhat authorita^ 
tively, certain principles of Art, neither derived from Alison 
nor from the Royal Academy. 

The " Graduate" says, " when public taste seems plunging 
deeper and deeper into degradation day by day, and when 
the press universally exerts such power as it possesses, to 
direct the feeling of the nation more completely to all that is 
theatrical, affected, and false m Art ; while it vents its ribald 
buffooneries on the most exalted truth, and the highest ideal 
of landscape, that this or any other age has ever witnessed, it 
becomes the impei*ative duty of all who have any perception or 
knowledge of what is really great in Art, and any desire for 
its advancement in England, to come fearlessly forward, regard- 
less of such individual interests as are likely to be injured by the 
knowledge of what is good and right, to declare and demon- 
strate, wherever they exist, the essence and the authority of the 
Beautiful and the True." 

The " Graduate" fearlessly asserts that the old masters were 
not true to Nature, and claims to be capable of fudging of 
these matters, for the very good reason, namely, that he has 
been devoted from his youth to the laborious study of j^racti- 
cal art ; and, moreover, that whatever he affirms of the old 
schools of landscape-painting has been " founded on a familiar 
acquaintance with eveiy important work of Art, from Antwerp 
to Naples." 

He, however, modestly apologizes for the imperfection of 
his first book, and keeps back a part of it from the public, for 
more mature reflection, and for careful revision. 



NOTICE OF JOHN liUSKIN AND HIS WORKS. XVU 

The Keviewers, who had so severely handled the landscape 
painter, now pounced upon the pamter's fiery advocate, who 
had challenged them to the encounter. 

Undaunted by then- fulminations, " the Graduate" cornea 
out with a second edition of " Modern Painters." 

" Convinced of the truth," says he, " and therefore assured 
of the ultimate prevalence and victory of the principles which 
I have advocated, and equally confident that the strength of 
the cause must give weight to the strokes of even the weakest 
of its defenders, I permitted myself to yield to a somewhat 
hasty and hot-headed desire of being, at whatever risk, in the 
thick of the fire, and begun the contest ^^ith a part, and that 
the weakest and least considerable part, of the forces at my 
disposal. And I novr find the volume thus boldly laid before 
the public, in a position much resembling that of the Royal 
Sovereign at Trafalgar, receiving, unsupported, the broadsides 
of half the enemy's fleet, while unforeseen circumstances have 
hitherto prevented, and must yet for a time prevent, my heavier 
ships of the line from taking any part in the action. I watched 
the first moment of the struggle with some anxiety for the 
solitary vessel, — an anxiety which I have noAv ceased to feel, — 
for the fag of truth waves brightly through the ^jpke of the 
battle, and- my antagonists, wholly intent on the destruction 
of the leading ship, have losjj^their position, and exposed them- 
selves in defenceless disorder to the attack of the following 
columns."' 

The enthusiasm of a man of genius appears to the multitude 
like madness. The fervor of his imagination and the intensity 
of his emotions, do, indeed, prevent him at times from per- 
ceiving clearly, not only what is for his own interest, but, 
what he would more earnestly deprecate, for the interest of 
the cause which he zealously advocates. Thus was it with the 



XVlll NOTICE OF JOnX KUSKIN AND IIIS WORKS. 

" Graduate," when, stung to the quick like Byron, hke him 
he retorted upon the " Scotcli Reviewer," 

" Writers like the present critic of Blackwood's Magazine 
deserve the respect due to honest, hopeless, helpless imbecility. 
There is something exalted in the innocence of their feehle- 
mindedness; one cannot susj^ect them of partiality, for it 
im})lies feeling ; nor of j^rcjudice, for it implies some previous 
acquaintance with their subject, I do not know that even in 
this age of charlatanry, I could point to a moi'e barefaced 
instance of imposture on the simplicity of the public, tli: n 
the insertion of these pieces of criticism in a respectaLle 
periodical. We are not insulted with opinions on music from 
persons ignorant of its notes ; nor with treatises on philology 
by persons unacquamted with the al})habet ; but here is page 
after page of criticism, w hich one may I'ead from end to end, 
looking for something which the author knows, and landing 
nothing, Not his own language, for he has to look in his dic- 
tionary, by his own confession, for a word (chrysoprase) 
occurring in one of the most imjjortant chapters of the 
Bible ; not the commonest traditions of the schools, for he 
does not know why Poussiu was called 'learned;' not the 
most simple canons of art, for he prefers Lee to Gain'^- 
bovough ; iBk the most ordinary facts of Nature, for Ave find 
him })uzzlcd by the epithet 'silver,' as applied to the orange- 
blossom — evidently never having seen anything silvery about 
an orange in his life, except a spoon. 

" Nay he leaves us not to conjecture his calibre from intci'nal 
evidence ; he candidly tells us, that he has been studying trees 
only for the last week^ and bases his critical remarks chiefly on 
his practical experience of birch, 

" What is Christopher North al>out ? Does he receive his 
critiques from Eton or Harrow, — based on the experience of a 
Aveek's bird's-nesting and its consequences? Hoav low must 
Art and its interests shik, Avhen the public mind is inadequate 



NOTICE OP JOHJf KUSKIN AND HIS WORKS. xix 

to the detection of this effrontery of incapacity. In all kind- 
ness to Maga, we warn her, that though the nature of this 
work precludes us from devoting space to the exposure, there 
may come a time when the public shall he themselves able to 
distinguish ribaldry from reasoning, and may require some 
better and higher qualifications in their critics of art, than the 
experience of a school-boy, and the capacities of a buifoon." 

" Moderation," though subsequently highly commended by 
our author, is not the governing characteristic of poets or of 
painters, especially when their " eyes are in a fine frenzy roll- 
ing" with either inspiration or anger. 

The second volume of " Modern Painters " was not issued 
till the first had passed through several editions. The author 
still chooses to appear only as the " Graduate of Oxford." 

The main topic of this second volume is the nature of 
Beauty, and its influence on the human mind. 

Again, the novelty and boldness of the writer's views 
startled and irritated the ice-bound advocates of precedent. 
Though no longer treated by the Reviewers with unmitigated 
contempt, he was still subjected to the lash of criticism. 

The banner, with the defiant inscription. Judex damnatur 
cicm nocens absolvitur, was again " hung out" at Edinburgh, 
but the "Graduate" probably quailed as little before it as 
Birnam "Wood quailed before the banners of Dunsinaiie. 
However, this second volume could not fail to elicit warm and 
earnest admiration. The North British Review pronounced 
it " a very extraordinary and delightful book, full of truth 
and goodness, of power and beauty," and "what is more 
and better than all, — everywhere, throughout this work, we 
trace evidences of a deep reverence and a godly fear, — a per- 



XX NOTICE OF JOHN KCSKIN AND HIS WORKS. 

petual though subdued acknowledgment of the Almighty, as 
the sum and substance, the beginnmg and the endmg of all 
truth, of all power, of all goodness, and of all beauty." 

Even the Edinburgh Review was compelled to acknoAvledge 
" Modern Painters" as " one of the most remarkable works 
on art which has appeared in our time." 

Discarding the incognito, the " Graduate" next appears 
before the public in a work entitled " The Seven Lamps of 
Architecture, by John Ruskin, Author of Modern Painters." 
The fanciful title and the reputation already acquired by the 
author of Modern Painters, at once drew attention to this 
learned and philosophical treatise on Architecture, It was 
discovered that the works of Mr, Ruskin " must be read ;" 
they must be discussed ; they must be " weighed and con- 
sidered," He had gained a standing-place, and possessed 
power enough to move, if not the world, at least a portion of 
its wisest and best. 

Three other eloquent and beautiful volumes on Architec- 
ture, entitled, " The Stones of Venice," were issued from 
time to time, while the promised volumes to complete " Mo- 
dern Painters" were still delayed. This delay was chiefly 
owing to the necessity under which the writer felt himself, of 
obtaining as many memoranda as possible of mediaeval build- 
ings in Italy and Normandy, now in process of destruction^ 
before that destruction should be consummated by the 
restorer or revolutionist. His " whole time," he says, " had 
been lately occupied in taking di-awings from one side of 
buildings, of which masons Avere knocking down the other." 
These memoranda, obtained in every case from jiersonal 
observation, had been collected at various times during seven' 



NOTICE OF JOHN RUSKIN AND UIS WORKS. XXI 

teen years. Not satisfied, however, with these occasional 
visits to the sea-girt city Mr. Ruskin went again to Venice, 
in 1849, to examine not only every one of the older palaces, 
stone by stone, but every fragment throughout the city, 
which afforded any clue to the formation of its styles." 

He says : " My taking the pains so to examine what I had 
to describe, was a subj ect of grave surprise to my Italian friends." 

" Three years' close and incessant labor to the examination 
of the chronology of the architecture of Venice ; two long 
winters being wholly spent in the drawing of details on the 
spot ; and yet I see constantly that architects who pass three 
or four days in a gondola, going up and down the grand 
canal, think that their first imj^ressions are as likely to be 
true as my patiently wrought conclusions." 

From these careful studies and measurements, drawings 
were made by Mr. Ruskin to illustrate " The Stones of Ve- 
nice," and afterwards engraved in England by tlie best 
artists. Besides the fine illustrations which adorn those beau- 
tiful volumes, Mr. Ruskin prepared a separate work, consist- 
ing entirely of engravings from drawing's which could not be 
reduced to the size of an octavo volume, without loss of accu- 
racy in detail. These magnificent engravings were published 
in London, by subscription, in twelve parts, folio imperial 
size, at the price of one guuiea each. They were fac-similes 
of Mr. Ruskin's drawings, and beautifully colored.* The 
" Seven Lamps of Architecture" and " The Stones of Venice" 

* All Mr. Ruskin's works, with the exception of two volumes of " The 
Stones of Venice," and these large illustrations, have been published in 
thia country by Wiley & Halsted, Broadway, New York. 



XXll NOTICE OF JOHN RUSKIN AND HIS WORKS. 

would alone have placed Mr. Ruskin among the very first 
writers on Art that England has ever nurtured. 

The subtle critic of Art then turned aside, by way of epi- 
sode, and wrote a feidlleton " On the Construction of Sheep- 
folds." Graceful, picturesque, rustic sheepfolds ? By no 
nieans. The versatile " Graduate of Oxford" must give his 
views on a subject Avhich at that time was agitating the minds 
and employing the pens of some of the ablest thinkers in 
Great Britain, namely, " The Church ;" its character, author- 
ity, teaching, government, and discipline. It was a " Tract 
for the Times," but in direct opposition to the Tracts of his 
venerable ahna mater. 

To this bold pamphlet was prefixed the following character- 
istic " advertisement : " — 

" Many persons Avill probably find fault with me for publish- 
ing opinions which are not new : but I shall bear this blame 
contentedly, believing that opinions on this subject could 
hardly be just if they were not 1800 years old. Others will 
blame me for making proposals which are altogether new ; to 
whom I would answer, that things in these days seem not 
so far right but that they may be mended. And others 
will simply call the opinions false and the proposals foolish — 
to whose good will, if they take it in hand to contradict me, 
I must leave what I have written, — having no purpose of 
being drawn, at present, into religious controversy. If, how- 
ever, any should admit the truth, but regret the tone of what 
I have said, I can only pray them to consider how much less 
harm is done in the world by ungraceful boldness, than by 
untimely fear." 

Whatever were the " opinions" thus promulgated, there can 
be no doubt that the author's motive was a suicere, earnest 
desire to do good. 



NOTICE OF JOnX EUSKIN AND UIS WORKS, X\:ii 

Auotlier pamphlet from tlie same prolific pen, eutitled 
" Pre-Ilapliaelitism," caused great excitement among- the 
artists, as Avell as the critics. 

At the close of the first volume of Modern Pamters, Mi-. 
Raskin gave the following advice to the young arti-sts of 
England : — " They should go to nature in all singleness of 
heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no 
other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning; reject- 
ing notliing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing. ' This 
lie quotes in the Preface to his Pre-Raphaelitism, and says, — 

"Advice which, whether bad or good, involved infinite labor 
and humiliation in the following it ; and was therefore, for 
the most part, rejected. It has, howe\er, been carried out, 
to the very letter, by a group of men who, for their reward, 
have been assailed with the most scurrilous abuse which I ever 
recollect seeing issue from the public i)ress, I have, there- 
fore, thought it due to them (the Pre-Raphaelites) to contra- 
dict the directly false statements which have been made 
respecting tlieir works ; and to ix)int out the kind of merit 
which, however deficient in some respects, those works possess 
beyond the possibility of dispute," 

Mr, Ruskin here says no more than Schiller had said before 
him : — 

" With genius, JSJature is bound in eternal alliance, — 
Wliatever mind has vowed, piously Nature performs." 

Then why was the hue and cry raised against his "Pre- 
Raphaelitism?" Sneers are not arguments. For the want 
of arguments was the Reviewer reduced to the following 
absurdity : — " If there were a ' Burchell' among painters, he 
wotild, in the author's presence, cry Fudge ! Nonsense !" 



XXIV NOTICE OF JOHN EUSKIN AND HIS WORKS. 

This would-be astute critic, however, like many t^ ho had 
gone before him, cried " mad dog" in vain. Mr. Ruskin still 
lives. 

The third volume of Modern Painters was issued ten years 
after the publication of the two first volumes. Those two 
volumes, as has already been mentioned, were written to check 
the attacks upon Turner. Little did the "Graduate" then 
foresee what a range his spirit would take, after its fii'st 
venturous flight ! 

" The chech was partially given, but too late ; Turner was 
seized by painful illness soon after the second volume appeared ; 
his works towards the close of the year 1845, showed a conclu- 
sive failure of power ; and I saw that nothing remained for 
me to write, but his epitaph." 

No one can fail to admire the generous, enthusiastic devo- 
tion of Mr. Ruskin to his favorite artist ; but, as few of 
Turner's paintings have reached this country, his eloquent 
descriptions of them, and subtle criticisms, Avould not be 
generally interesting, and have therefore been omitted in the 
" Selections" from his Works. 

Engravings, however, from many of Turner's pictui'es are 
well known among us, and highly prized by genuine lovers of 
the Beautiful. Among these engravings the Illustrations to 
Rogers's Italy have been universally admired. 

In November, 1853, Mr. Ruskin delivered four Lectures in 
Edinburgh, on Architecture and Painting ; which have since 
been published in a beautifully illustrated volume. 

He thought himself happy, he says, in his first Lecture, to 
address the citizens of Edinburgh on the subject of Architec- 



NOTICE OF JOHN EUSKrN" ATW HIS WORKS. XXV 

ture ; and yet, vnih his usual boldness and disregard of con- 
sequences to himself personally, he launched forth into a com 
plete tirade against the Greek Architecture of that beautiful 
city. No doubt Mr. Ruskin remembered with some asjDerity 
the castigations of the Edinburgh Reviewers, and knowing 
that he was now strong enough to chastise the chastisers, he 
laid it on without mercy. Yet he is too earnest and too 
honest a man to say one word that he does not firmly beheve 
to be for the advancement of noble Art. 

The Fourth Volume of " Modern Painters" is one of his 
ablest works. His versatile mind here grapples with Science 
as successfully as it has hitherto done with Art. Among the 
Alps and their glaciers, he would have been a fit companion 
for the learned Guyot. 

In pursuit of his investigations he had stood " where the 
black thundercloud was literally dashing itself in his face, 
■while the blue hills seen through its rents were thirty miles 
away." 

Indefatigable in the pursuit of that branch of Art, which 
"in all liis lovings is the love," Mr. Ruskin has lately written 
a book for young persons, entitled, " The Elements of Draw- 
ing, in three Letters to Beginners." He always writes con 
amore, but never more so than in this valuable little treatise. 
Mr. Ruskin is not only a practical artist, but he has also had 
much experience in teaching, being employed at present as 
head-teacher of a class in Drawing, in the Working Men's 
College, 45 Great Ormond Street, London. 

" The Political Economy of Art," the last published work 
by Mr. Ruskin, is the substance (with additions) of two 
Lectures delivered at Manchester, July 10th and 13th, 1857: 



XXVI NOTICE OF JOHN RUSKIN AND HIS WORK?. 

The great " Art Treasures Exliibition," at Manchester, had 
brought together a splendid collection of pictures from the 
galleries, public and private, of the Bi'itish kingdom, and it 
Avas a fine opportunity for Mr. Ruskin to address the lovers 
of art in behalf of artists and working-men. He did so, with 
wisdom, justice, and deep feeling ; it is to be hoped that the 
influence of those lectures will not be confined to his own 
country. 

As a Christian Philosopher, Mr. Ruskin deservedly ranks 
with the "judicious" Hooker, the eloquent Jeremy Taylor, 
and the "divine" Herbert. A devout spirit animates and 
inspires all his Avorks. In the lowly cottage and the lofly 
cathedral, in the smiling valley and in the sublime mountain- 
top, he has an ever-realizing sense of the presence of God ; 
and acknowledges that divine presence, not with light words, 
but with words of solemn import ; — not as the God of Nature 
alone, but as the Almighty Father and Friend revealed in the 
life-giving gospel of Jesus Christ. 

The most striking characteristic of Mr, Ruskin, next to hia 
dee\) religious sentiments, is his intense love of Nature : — 

" "Where rose the mountains, these to him were friends; 

"Where rolled the ocean, thereon was his home ; 
"Where a blue sky and glowing cUme extends, 

He had the passion and the power to roam ; 
The desert, forest, cavern, breaker's foam, 

"Were unto him companionship ; they spoke 
A mutual language, clearer than the tome 

Of his land's tongue, which he would oft forsake 
For Nature's pages, glassed by sunbeams on the lake." 



NOTICE OF JOHN BUSKIN AND HIS WORKS. XXVll 

Mr. Ruskin furnishes his readers with a lens through which 
all natural objects are glorified ; the sky assumes new beauty 
— the clouds are decked with wondrous magnificence, — and 
even each individual tree excites curiosity and intense admira. 
tion. As he exults over them, we are ready to exclaim, with 
one of our own eloquent wiiters, — "What a thought that 
was, when God thought of a tree !" 

It is a rare and delightful privilege to know exactly how the 
love of the Beautiful in Nature has been developed in any 
one human being ; more especially in a many-sided being, 
such as John Ruskin. He has himself given us this privilege, 
for which we owe him many thanks, in the following charming 
morsel of philosoi^hical autobiography : 

" I cannot, from observation, form any decided opinion as to 
the extent in which this strange dehght in nature influences 
the hearts of young persons in general ; and, in stating Avhat 
has passed in my own mind, I do not mean to draw any posi- 
tive conclusion as to the nature of the feeling in other children ; 
but the inquiry is clearly one in which j)crsoual exi:)erience is 
the only safe ground to go upon, though a narroAV one ; and I 
will make no excuse for talking about myself with reference 
to this subject, because, though there is much egotism in the 
world, it is often the last thing a man thinks of doing, — and, 
though there is much work to be done in the world, it is often 
the best thing a man can do, — to teU the exact truth about 
the movements of his own mind ; and there is tliis farther rea- 
son, that, whatever other faculties I may or may not possess, this 
gift of taking pleasure in landscape I assuredly possess in a 
greater degree than most men ; it having been the ruling pas- 
sion of my life, and the reason for the choice of its field of 
labor. 



XXVlll NOTICE OF JOHN RUSKIX AND HIS WORKS. 

" The first thing which I remember as an eA'ent in life, was 
being taken by my nurse to the brow of Friar's Crag on Der- 
wentwater ; the intense joy, mingled with awe, that I had in 
looking through the hollows in the mossy roots, over the crag, 
into the dark lake, has associated itself more or less with all 
twining roots of trees ever since. Two other things I remem- 
ber, as, in a sort, beginnings of life ; — crossing Shapfells (being 
let out of the chaise to run up the hills), and going through 
Glenfarg, near Kinross, in a winter's morning, when the rocks 
were hung with icicles ; these being culminating points in an 
early life of more travelling than is usually indulged to a child. 
In such journeyings, whenever they brought me near hills, and 
in all mountain ground and scenery, I had a pleasure, as early 
as I can remember, and continuing till I was eighteen or 
twenty, infinitely greater than any which has been since possi- 
ble to me in anything ; comparable for intensity only to the 
joy of a lover in being near a noble and kind mistress, but no 
more explicable or definable than that feeling of love itself. 
Only thus much I can remember, respecting it, which is 
important to our present subject. 

" First : it was never indei:)endent of associated thought. 
Almost as soon as I could see or hear, I had got reading 
enough to give me associations with all kinds of scenery ; and 
mountains, in particular, were always partly confused with 
those of my fovorite book, Scott's Monastery ; so that Glen- 
farg and all other glens were more or less enchanted to me, 
filled with forms of hesitating creed about Christie of the Clint 
Hill, and the monk Eustace; and with a general presence of 
White Lady everywhere. I also generally knew, or was told 
by my father and mother, such simple facts of histoi'^ as were 
necessary to give more definite and justifiable association to 
other scenes which chiefly interested me, such as the ruins of 
Lochleven and Kenilworth ; and thus my pleasure in moun- 
tains or ruins was never, even in earliest childhood, free from 
a certain awe and melancholy, and general sense of the mean- 



NOTICE OF JOHN EUSKIN AND UIS WORKS. XXIX 

ing of death, though iii its principal influence entii'ely exhila- 
rating and gladdening. 

" Secondly : it was partly dependent on contrast with a very 
simple and unamused mode of general life ; I was born in Lon- 
don, and accustomed, for two or three years, to no other jiros- 
pect than that of the brick walls over the way ; had no 
brothers, nor sisters, nor companions; and though I could 
always make myself happy in a quiet way, the beauty of the 
mountains had an additional charm of change and adventure 
which a country-bred child would not have felt. 

" Thh-dly : there was no definite religious feeling muigled 
with it. I partly believed in ghosts and fairies ; but supposed 
that angels belonged entirely to the Mosaic dispensation, and 
cannot remember any single thought or feeling connected 
with them. I believed that God was in heaven, and could 
hear me and see me ; but this gave me neither pleasure nor 
pain, and I seldom thought of it at all. I never thought 
of nature as God's Avork, but as a separate fact or existence. 

"Fourthly: it was entirely unaccompjmied by powers of 
reflection or invention. Every fancy that I had about nature 
was put into my head by some book ; and I never reflected 
about anything till I grew older; and then, the more I 
reflected, the less nature was precious to me : I could then 
make myself happy, by thinking, in the dark, or in the dullest 
scenery ; and the beautiftil scenery became less essential to my 
jjleasure. 

" Fifthly : it was, according to its strengtl), inconsistent \vith 
every evil feeling, with spite, anger, covetousness, discontent, 
and every other hateful passion ; but would associate itself 
deeply with every just and noble soi'row, joy, or affection. It 
had not, however, always the power to repress what was incon- 
sistent with it ; and, though only after stout contention, might 
at last be crushed by what it had partly repressed. And as it 
only acted by setting one impulse against another, though it 
had much power in moulding the character, it had hardly any 



XXX NOTICE OF JOHN EUSKIN AND HIS WORKS. 

in strengthening it ; it formed temperament, but never instilled 
princii:)le ; it kept me generally good-hmnored and kindly, but 
could not teach me perseverance or self-denial : what firmness 
or principle I had was quite independent of it ; and it came 
itself nearly as often in the form of a temptation as of a safe- 
guard, leading me to ramble over hills when I should have 
been learning lessons, and lose days in reveries which I mighty 
have spent in doing kindnesses. 

" Lastly : although there was no definite religious sentiment 
mingled with it, there was a continual perception of Sanctity 
in the whole of nature, from the slightest thing to the vastest ; 
— an instinctive awe, mixed with delight ; an indefinable thrill, 
such as we sometimes imagine to indicate the presence of a 
disembodied spirit. I could only feel this perfectly when I 
was alone ; and then it would often make me shiver from head 
to foot Avith the joy and fear of it, when after being some time 
away from the hUls, I first got to the shore of a mountain 
river, where the brown water circled among the pebbles, or 
when I saw the first swell of distant land against the sunset, 
or the first low broken wall, covered with mountain moss. I 
cannot in the least describe the feeling : but I do not think 
this is my fault, nor that of the English language, for, I am 
afraid, no feeling is describable. If we had to explain even 
the sense of bodily hunger to a person who had never felt it, 
we should be hard put to it for words ; and this joy in nature 
seemed to me to come of a sort of heart-hunger, satisfied with 
the presence of a Great an^ Holy" Spirit. These feelings 
remained in their full intensity till I was eighteen or twenty, 
and then, as the reflective and practical power increased, and 
the ' cares of this world ' gained upon me, faded gradually 
away, in the manner described by Wordsworth in his Intimsr 
tions of Immortality." 

Happily for the world, these emotions, or " feelings," became 
enthroned in the Intellect of Ruskin. 



NOTICE OP JOHX RUSKIN AND HIS WORKS. XXXI 

" He who feels Beauty, but cannot intellectually recognise 
it, is ever dependent for this most joyous of emotions upon the 
vernal freshness of his senses ; and as these grow dull, as youth 
flits past, the emotion of the beautiful gradually becomes a 
thing unknown.' It is only through feeling that aesthetic emo- 
tion can touch such an one ; and how soon, alas ! does this 
medium between man and nature, between the soul and exter- 
nal things grow sluggish and torpid ! But icith him loho 
has learned to know as well as to feel — lohose soul is one clear 
sky of intelligence, — the case is far otherwise. Intellect 
brightens as the senses grow dull ; and though the sensuous 
imagination pass into the yellow leaf as the autumn of life 
draws on, still will the Beautiful, having secured for itself a 
retreat in the intellect, natui'ally pass into immortality along 
with it. An old man, with closed eyes and flowing hair, 
would again, as in the days of ancient Greece, form the ideal 
of a poet ; and the taste of the age of Pericles, enlightened by 
modern philosophy, and purified by Christianity, m,ight again 
return.'''' 

A higher aim even than this will, we trust, be attempted 
in our own country. True ; Art is here yet in its infancy. 
Its healthful, vigorous growth and development, will depend 
mainly upon the general cultivation of a correct Taste. We 
cannot expect our Artists to pursue high and noble aims until 
the standard of Taste is proportionably elevated. 

For the study of nature, — the inseparable ally of Art, — no 
finer field can be found on the wide earth, than our own wide 
country; — and no better guide and interpreter, than John 

RUSKIN. 

L. C. T. 



JJart 1. 
B E _A. U T Y. 



Scatter diligently in susceptible minds 
The germs of the good and the beautiful I 
They will develope there to trees, bud, bloow, 
And bear the golden fruits of Paradise. 



|)art 1. 

BEAUTY. 

AxY material object which can give us pleasure in the simple 
contemi^lation of its outward qualities, without any direct and 
definite exertion of the intellect, I call in some way, or in some 
degree, beautiful. Why we receive pleasure from some forms 
and colors, and not from others, is no niore to be asked or 
answered than why we like sugar and dislike wormwood. The 
utmost subtilty of investigation will only lead us to ultimate 
instincts and principles of human nature, for which no further 
reason can be given than the simple wiU of the Deity that we 
should be so created. We may, indeed, perceive, as far as we are 
acquainted with His nature, that we have been so constructed 
as, when in a nealthy and cultivated state of mind, to derive 
pleasure from whatever things are illustrative of that nature ; 
but we do not receive pleasure from them because they are 
illustrative of it, nor from any perception that they are illus- 
trative of it, but instinctively and necessarily, as we derive 
sensual pleasure from the scent of a rose. On these primary 
princiijles of our nature, education and accident operate to an 
unUmited extent ; they may be cultivated or checked, directed 
or diverted, gifted by right guidance with the most acute and 
faultless sense, or subjected by neglect to every phase of error 
and disease. He who has followed up these natural laws of 
aversion and desire, rendering them more and more authorita- 
tive by constant obedience, so as to derive pleasure always from 
that wliich God originally intended should give him pleasure, 



4 BEAUTY. 

and who derives the greatest possible sura of pleasure fi*om 
Any given object, is a man of ta3te. 

This, then, is the real meaning of this disputed word. Per- 
fect taste is the faculty of receiving the greatest possible 
pleasure from those material sources Avhich are attractive to 
our moral nature in its purity and perfection. He who receives 
little pleasure from these sources, wants taste ; he who receives 
pleasure from any other sources, has false or bad taste. 

And it is thus that the term " taste " is to be distinguished 
from that of "judgment," with which it is constantly con- 
founded. Judgment is a general term, expressing definite 
action of the intellect, and applicable to every kind of subject 
which can be submitted to it. There may be judgment of 
congruity, judgment of truth, judgment of justice, and judg- 
ment of difficulty and excellence. But all these exertions of 
intellect are totally distinct from taste, properly so called, 
which is the instinctive and instant preferring of one material 
object to another without any obvious reason, that it is proper 
to human nature in its perfection so to do. 

Observe, however, I do not mean by excluding direct exer- 
tion of the intellect from ideas of beauty, that beauty has no 
effect upon nor connexion with the intellect. All our moral 
feelings are so inwoven "svith our intellectual powers, that we 
cannot affect the one without, in some degree, addressing the 
other ; and in all high ideas of beauty it is more than proba- 
ble that much of the pleasure depends on delicate and untrace- 
able perceptions of fitness, propriety, and relation, which are 
purely intellectual, and through which we arrive at our noblest 
ideas of what is commonly and rightly called "intellectual 
beauty." But there is yet no immediate exertion of the intel- 
lect ; that is to say, if a person, receiving even the noblest 
ideas of simple beauty, be asked wAy he likes the object excit- 
ing them, he will not be able to give any distinct reason, nor 



BEAUTY. 5 

to trace in his mind any formal thought to which he can 
appeal as a source of pleasure. He ^y\R say that the thing 
gratifies, fills, haUows, exalts his mind, but he wiU not be able 
to say why, or how. If he can, and if he can show that he 
perceives in the object any expression of distinct thought, he 
has received more than an idea of beauty — ^.it is an idea of 
relation. 

By the term ideas of relation^ I mean to express all 
those sources of pleasure which iuvolve and require, at the 
instant of their perception, active exertion of the intellectual 
powers. 

The sensation of Beauty is not sensual on the one hand, nor 
is it intellectual on the other, but is dependent on a pure, right, 
and open state of the heart, both for its truth and its inten- 
sity, insomuch that even the right after-action of the intellect 
ujion facts of beauty so apprehended, is dependent on the 
acuteness of the heart-feeling about them ; and thus the apos- 
tolic words come true, in this minor respect as in all others, 
that men are alienated from the life of God, " through the 
ignorance that is in them, having the understanding darkened, 
because of the hardness of their hearts, and so being past 
feeling, give themselves up to lasciviousness ;" for we do 
indeed see constantly that men having naturally acute percep 
tions of the beautiful, yet not receiving it with a pure heart, 
nor into their hearts at all, never comprehend it, nor receive 
good from it, but make it a mere minister to their desires, 
and accompaniment and seasoning of lower sensual pleasures, 
until all their emotions take the same earthly stamp, and the 
sense of beauty sinks into the servant of lust. 

Xor is what the world commonly understands by the eiiUi- 
vation of taste, anything more or better than this, at least in 
times of corrupt and over-pampered civilization, when men 
build palaces, and plant groves, and gather luxuries, that they 



6 BEAUTY. 

and their devices may hang iu the corners of the world like 
fine-spun cobwebs, with greedy, puflfed up, spider-like lusts in 
the middle. And this, which in Christian times is the abuse 
and corruption of the sense of beauty, was in that Pagan life 
of which St. Paul speaks little less than the essence of it, and 
the best they had ; for I know not that of the expressions of 
afi*ection towards external Nature to be found among Heathen 
wi'iters, there are any of which the balance and leading thought 
cleaves not towards the sensual parts of her. Her benefi- 
cence they sought, and her j)ower they shunned; her teaching 
through both they miderstood never. The pleasant influences 
of soft winds, and singing streamlets, and shady coverts, of tLe 
violet couch and plane-tree shade, they received, perhaps, in a 
more noble way than we, but they found not anything except 
fear, upon the bare mountain or in the ghastly glen. The 
Hybla heather they lo^ed more for its sweet hives than its 
purple hues. But the Christian theoria seeks not, though it 
accepts, and touches with its own purity, what the Epicurean 
sought, but finds its food and the objects of its love every- 
where, in what is harsh and fearful, as well as what is kind, 
nay even m all that seems coarse and common-place ; seizing 
that which is good, and delighting more sometimes at finding 
its table spread in strange places, and in the presence of its 
enemies, and its honey coming out of the rock, than if all 
were harmonized into a less wondrous pleasure ; hating only 
Avhat is self-sighted and insolent of men's work, despising all 
that is not of God ; yet able to find evidence of Him still, 
where all seems forgetful of Him, and to turn that into a wit- 
ness of His working which was meant to obscure it, and so 
with clear and unofiending sight beholding Him for ever, 
according to the written promise, — " Blessed are the pure in 
heart, for they shall see God." 

Ideas of Beauty are among the noblest which can be jn-e- 



•^ 



BEAUTY. 1^ 

sented to the human mind, invariably exalting and pu 'ifying 
it according to their degree ; and it would appear that we are 
intended by the Deity to be constantly under their influence, 
because there is not one single object in nature which is not 
capable of conveying them, and which, to the rightly perceiv- 
ing mind, does not present an incalculably greater number of 
beautiful, than of deformed parts ; there being in fact scarcely 
anything, in pure, undiseased Nature, like positive deformity, 
but only degrees of beauty, or such slight and rare points of 
permitted contrast as may render all around them more valu- 
able by their opposition; spots of blackness in creation, to 
make its colors felt. But although everything in Nature is 
more or less beautiful, every species of object has its own 
kind and degree of beauty ; some being in their own nature 
more beautiful than others, and few, if any individuals, possess 
ing the utmost beauty of which the species is capable. This 
utmost degree of specific beauty, necessarily co-existent with 
the utmost perfection of the object in other respects, is the 
ideal of the object. 

We must be modest and cautious in the pronouncing of 
positive opinions on the subject of beauty ; for every one of 
us has peculiar sources of enjoyment necessarily opened to 
him in certain scenes and things, sources which are sealed to 
others ; and we must be wary, on the one hand, of confounding 
these in ourselves with ultimate conclusions of taste, and so 
forcing them upon all as authoritative ; and on the other, of 
supposing that the enjoyments, which we cannot share, are 
shallow or unwarrantable, because incommunicable. By the 
term Beauty, two things are signified; First, that external 
quality of bodies which may be shown to be in some sort 
typical of the Divine attributes, and which, therefore, I shall 
for distinction's sake call typical beauty; and second, the 



8 BEAUTY. 

appearance of felicitous fulfilment of functions in many tMngs^ 
and this I shall call vital beauty. 

Let u? briefly distinguish those qualities, or types, on 
whose combination is dependent the power of mere material 
loveliness. I pretend neither to enumerate nor to perceive 
them all ; yet certain powerful and palpable modes there are, 
by observing wliich, we may come at such general conclusions 
on the subject as may be practically useful. 

1. Infinity, or the type of Divine Incomprehensibility. 

2. Unity, or the type of the Divine Comprehensiveness. 

3. Repose, or the type of the Divme Permanence. 

4. Symmetry, or the type of the Divine Justice. 

5. Purity, or the type of Divine Energy. 

6. Moderation, or the type of Government by Law. 



I. — INFINITY. 



Heaven lies about us in our infancy, — 

Shades of the prison-house begin to close 

Upon the growing boy. 

But he beholds the liglit, and whence it flows, 

He sees it in his joy. 

The youth, who daily farther from the east 

Must travel, stiU is nature's priest. 

And by the vision splendid 

Is on his way attended. 

At length the man perceives it die away, 

And fade into the light of common day. 

One, however, of these child instincts, I believe that few for- 
get ; the emotion, namely, caused by all open ground, or lines 
of any spacious kind against the sky, behind which there might 
be conceived the sea. 



I^^FI^'ITY. 9 

Whatever beauty there may result from effects of hgnt on 
foreground objects, from the dew of the grass, the flash of the 
cascade, the glitter of the bii'ch trunk, or the fair daylight hues 
of darker things (and joyfulness there is in all of them), there 
is yet a light which the eye invariably seeks with a deeper 
feeling of the beautiful, the light of the declining or breaking 
day, and the flakes of scarlet cloud burning like watch-fires in 
the green sky of the horizon ; a deeper feeling, I say, not perhaps 
mere acute, but having more of spLritual hope and longing, less 
of animal and present life, more manifest, invariably, in those 
of more serious and determined mind (I use the word serious, 
not as being opposed to cheerful, but to trivial and volatile) ; 
but, I think, marked and unfailing even in those of the least 
thoughtful dispositions. I am willing to let it rest on the 
determination of every reader, whether the pleasure which he 
has received from these efiects of calm and luminous distance 
be not the most singular and memorable of which he has been 
conscious ; whether all that is dazzling in color, perfect in form, 
gladdening in expression, be not of evanescent and shallow 
appealing, when compared with the still small voice of the level 
twilight behmd purple hills, or the scarlet arch of dawn over 
the dark, troublous-edged sea. 

Let us try to discover that which eflfects of this kind possess 
or suggest, peculiar to themselves, and which other efiects of 
light and color possess not. There 7nust be something in them 
of a pecuHar character, and that, whatever it be, must be one of 
the primal and most earnest motives of beauty to human 
sensation. 

Do they show finer characters of form than can be developed 

by the broader daylight ? Not so ; for their power is almost 

independent of the forms they assume or display ; it matters 

little whether the bright clouds be simple or manifold, whether 

,the mountain Ime be subdued or majestic; the fairer forms of 

1* 



10 BEAUTY. 

earthly things are by them subdued and disguised, the rouad 
and muscular growth of the forest trunks is sunk into skeleton 
lines of quiet shade, the purple clefts of the hill-side are laby- 
rinthed in the darkness, the orbed spring and whirling wave 
of the torrent have given place to a white, ghastly, interrupted 
gleaming. Have they more perfection or fuhiess of color? 
Not so ; for their effect is oftentimes deeper when their hues 
are dim, than when they are blazoned with crimson and pale 
gold ; and assuredly in the blue of the rainy sky, in the many 
tints of morning flowers, in the sunlight on summer foliage and 
field, there are more sources of mere sensual color-pleasure than 
in the single streak of wan and dying light. It is not then by 
nobler form, it is not by positiveness of hue, it is not by 
mtensity of light (for the sun itself at noonday is effectless ui^on 
the feelings), that this strange distant space possesses its 
attractive power. But there is one thing that it has, or 
suggests, which no other object of sight suggests in equal 
degree, and that is, — Infinity. It is of all visible thmgs the 
least material, the least finite, the farthest withdrawn from the 
earth i:)rison-house, the most typical of the nature of God, the 
most suggestive of the glory of his dwelling-pluce. For the 
sky of night, though we may know it boundless, is dark, it is a 
studded vault, a roof that seems to shut us in and down ; but 
the bright distance has no limit — we feel its infinity, as we 
rejoice in its jDurity of light. 

Let the reader bear constantly in mind, that I uisist not 
on his accepting any interpretation of mme, but only on his 
dwelling so long on those objects, which he perceives to be 
beautiful, as to determine whether the quahties to which I 
trace their beauty be necessarily there or no. Farther expres- 
sions of infinity there are in the mystery of Nature, and in 
some measure in her vastness, but these are dependent on 
our own imperfections, and therefore, though they produce 



UNITY. 11 

sublimity they are unconnected with beauty. For that which 
we foolishly call vastness is, rightly considered, not more won- 
derful, not more impressive, than that which we insolently 
call littleness ; and the infinity of God is not mysterious, it is 
only unfathomable ; not concealed, but incomprehensible ; it is 
a clear infinity, the darkness of the pure, unsearchable sea. 



II. IJNITY. 



" All things," says Hooker, " (God only excepted) besides 
the nature which they have in themselves, receive externally 
some perfection from other things." The Divine essence I 
think it better to speak of as comprehensiveness, than as unity, 
because unity is often imderstood in the sense of oneness or 
singleness, instead of universality, whereas the only Unity 
wliich by any means can become grateful or an object of hope 
to men, and whose types therefore in material things can be 
beautiful, is that on ^\hich turned the last words and prayer of 
Christ before his crossing of the Kidron brook. " Neither 
pray I for these alone, but for them also wliich shall beUeve on 
me through their word. That they all may be one, as thou, 
Father, art in me, and I in thee." 

And so there is not any matter, nor any spirit, nor any 
creature, but it is capable of a unity of some kind with other 
creatures, and in that unity is its perfection and theirs, and a 
pleasure also for the beholding of all other creatures that can 
behold. So the unity of spirits is partly in their sympathy, 
and partly in their giving and taking, and always in their love ; 
and these are their delight and their strength, for their 



12 BEAUTY. 

strength is in their co-working and army fellowship, and their 
dehght is in the giving and receiving of alternate and poi-petual 
currents of good, their inseparable dependency on each other's 
being, and their essential and perfect depending on their Cre- 
ator's : and so the unity of earthly creatures is their power and 
their peace, not like the dead and cold peace of undisturbed 
stones and solitary mountains, but the living peace of trust, 
and the living power of support, of hands that hold each other 
and are still : and so the unity of matter is, in its noblest form, 
the organization of it which builds it up into temples for the 
spirit, and ui its lower form, the sweet and strange affinity, 
which gives to it the glory of its orderly elements, and the fair 
variety of change and assimilation that turns the dust mto the 
crystal, and separates the waters that be above the firmament 
from the waters that be beneath ; and in its lowest form, it is 
the working and walking and clingmg together that gives their 
power to the winds, and its syllables and soundings to the air, 
and their weight to the waves, and their burning to the sim- 
beams, and their stability to the mountains, and to every crea- 
ture whatsoever operation is for its glory and for others' good. 
Among aU things which are to have unity of membership one 
with another, there must be difference or variety ; and though 
it is possible that many like things may be made members of 
one body, yet it is remarkable that this structure appears 
characteristic of the lower creatures, rather than the higher, 
as the many legs of the caterpillar, and the many arms and 
suckers of the radiata, and that, as we rise in order of being, 
the number of similar members becomes less, and their struc- 
ture commonly seems based on the principle of the unity of 
two things by a third, as Plato has it in the Timaeus, § II. 

Hence, out of the necessity of imity, arises that of variety, 
a necessity often more vividly, though never so deeply felt, 
because lying at the sm-faces of things, and assisted by an 



REPOSE. 13 

influential princij)le of oiu' nature, the love of change, and the 
power of contrast. Receiving variety, only as that which 
accomplishes Unity, or makes it perceived, its operation is 
found to be very precious. 

The effect of variety is best exemplified by the melodies of 
music, wherein, by the difierences of the notes, they are con- 
nected with each other in certain pleasant relations. Thia 
connexion taking place in quantities is Proportion. 

This influence of apparent proportion — a proj^ortion, be it 
obsei'ved, which has no reference to ultimate ends, but which 
is itself, seemingly, the end and object of operation in many 
of the forces of nature — is therefore at the root of all our 
delight in any beautiful form whatsoever. 

It is utterly vain to endeavor to reduce this proportion to 
finite rules, for it is as various as musical melody, and the 
laws to which it is subject are of the same general kind, so 
that the determination of right or wrong proportion is as 
much a matter of feeling and experience as the appreciation 
of good musical composition ; not but that there is a science ol 
both, and principles which may not be infringed, but that 
within these limits the liberty of invention is infinite, and the 
degrees of excellence, infinite also. 



in. REPOSE. 



There is probably no necessity more Imperatively felt by the 
artist, no test more unfailing of the greatness of artistical 
treatment, than that of the appearance of repose, and yet there 
is no quaUty whose semblance in mere matter is more difficult 
to define or illustrate. Nevertheless, I believe that our instiiic 



14 BEAUTY. 

tive love of it, as well as the cause to which I attribute that love, 
(although here also, as in the former cases, I contend not for 
the mterpretation, but for the fact,) will be readily allowed by 
the reader. As opposed to passion, changefulness, or laborious 
exertion, rejjose is the especial and separating characteristic 
of the eternal mmd and power; it is the "I am" of the Creator 
opposed to the "I become" of all creatures ; it is the sign alike 
of the supreme knowledge which is incapable of surprise, the 
supreme power which is incapable of labor, the supreme 
volition which is incapable of change ; it is the stillness of the 
beams of the eternal chambers laid uj)on the variable waters 
of ministering creatures ; and as we saw before that the infinity 
which was a type of the Divine nature on the one hand, became 
yet more desirable on the other from its peculiar address to 
our jjrison hopes, and to the expectations of an unsatisfied and 
unaccomplished existence, so the types of this third attribute 
of the Deity might seem to have been rendered farther attrac- 
tive to mortal instinct, through the infliction upon the fallen 
creature of a curse necessitating a labor once unnatural and 
still most painful, so that the desire of rest planted in the heart 
is no sensual nor unworthy one, but a longing for renovation 
and for escape from a state whose every phase is mere 
preparation for another equally transitory, to one in which 
permanence shall have become possible through perfection. 
Hence the great call of Christ to men, that call on which St. 
Augustine fixed essential expression of Christian hope, is 
accompanied by the promise of rest ; and the death-bequest 
of Christ to men is " peace." 

Hence, I think there is no desire more intense or more 
exalted than that which exists in all rightly disciplined minds, 
for the evidences of repose in external signs. I say fearlessly 
respecting repose, that no work of art can be great without 
it, and that all art is great in proportion to the apjiearance 



REPOSE. 15 

of it. It is the most unfailing test of beauty, whetner 
of mattei- or of motion ; nothing can be ignoble that pos- 
sesses it, nothing right that has it not; and in strict pro- 
portion to its appearance in the work, is the majesty of mind 
to be inferred in the artificer. Without regard to other qua- 
lities, we may look to this for our evidence, and by the search 
of this alone we may be led to the rejection of all that is base, 
and the accepting of all that is good and great, for the paths 
of wisdom are all peace. 

We shall see by this light three colossal images standing up 
side by side, looming in their great rest of spirituality above 
the whole world-horizon ; Phidias, Michael Angelo, and 
Dante ; and then, separated from their great religious thrones 
only by less fulness and earnestness of faith. Homer and Shak- 
speare : and from these we may go down step by step among 
the mighty men of every age, securely and certainly observant 
of diminished lustre in every appearance of restlessness and 
effort, until the last trace of true inspiration vanishes in the 
tottering affectations, or the tortured inanities of modern 
times. There is no art, no pursuit, whatsoever, but its results 
may be classed by this test alone ; everything of evU is be- 
trayed and T^dnnowed away by it, glitter and confusion and 
glare of color, inconsistency or absence of thought, forced 
expression, evU choice of subject, over accumulation of ma- 
terials, whether in painting or literature ; the shallowness of 
the English schools of art, the strained and disgusting horrors 
of tlie French, the distorted feverishness of the German : — 
pretence, over-decoration, over-division of parts in architec- 
ture, and again in music, in acting, in dancing, in whatsoever 
art, great or mean, there are yet degrees of greatness or mean 
nes:"> entirely dependent on this single quality of repose. 

But that which in Hfeless things ennobles them by seeming 
to indicate 'life, ennobles higher creatures by indicating the 



16 BEAUTY. 

exaltation of their earthly vitality into a Divine vitality ; and 
raising the life of sense into the life of faith — faith, whether we 
receive it m the sense of adherence to resolution, obedience to 
law, regardfulness of promise, in which from all. time it has 
been the test as the shield of the true being and life of man, 
or in the still higher sense of trustfulness in the presence, 
kindness, and word of God ; in which form it has been exhi- 
bited under the Christian dispensation. For whether in one 
or other form, whether the faithfulness of men whose path is 
chosen and portion fixed, in the following and receiving of 
that path and portion, as in the Thermopylae camp ; or the 
happier faithfulness of children in the good giving of their 
Father, and of subjects in the conduct of their king, as in the 
" Stand stUl and see the salvation of God" of the Red Sea 
shore, there is rest and peacefulness, the " standing still" in 
both, the quietness of action determined, of spirit xmalarmed, 
of expectation uuimpatient : beautiful, even when based only 
as of old, on the self-command and self-possession, the persis- 
tent dignity or the uncalculating love of the creature,* but 
more beautiful yet when the rest is one of humiHty instead of 
pride, and the trust no more in the resolution we have taken, 
but in the hand we hold. 



* " The universal instinct of repose, 

The longing for confirmed tranquillity 
Inward and outward, humble, yet sublime. 
The life where hope and memory are as one. 
Earth quiet and unchanged ; the human soul 
Consistent in self rule ; and heaven revealed 
To meditation, in that quietness." 

"Wordsworth. Excursion, Book iii. 



SYMMETRY. 17 



IV. SYMMETRY. 

In all perfectly beautiful objects, there is found the opposi- 
tion of one part to another and a recijDrocal balance obtained ; 
in animals the balance being commonly between opposite 
sides (note the disagreeableness occasioned by the exception 
in flat fish, having the eyes on one side of the head), but in 
vegetables the opposition is less distinct, as in the boughs on 
opposite sides of trees, and the leaves and sprays on each side 
of the boughs, and in dead matter less perfect stiU, often 
amounting only to a certain tendency towards a balance, as in 
the opposite sides of valleys and alternate Avindings of streams. 
In things ui which perfect symmetry is from their nature im- 
possible or improper, a balance must be at least in some mea- 
sure expressed before they can be beheld with pleasure. 
Hence the necessity of what artists require as opposing lines 
or masses in composition, the propriety of which, as well as 
their value, depends chiefly on their inartificial and natural 
invention. Absolute equality is not required, stUl less abso- 
lute similarity. A mass of subdued color may be balanced by 
a point of a powerful one, and a long and latent line overjDow- 
ered by a short and conspicuous one. The only error against 
which it is necessary to guard the reader with respect to sym- 
metry, is the confounding it with proportion, though it seems 
strange that the two terms could ever have been used as 
synonymous. Symmetry is the opposition of equal quantities 
to each other. Proportion the connection of unequal quanti- 
ties with each other. The property of a tree in sending out 
equal boughs on opposite sides is symmetrical. Its senduig 
out shorter and smaller towards the to]?, proportional. In 
the human face its balance of ojiposite sides is symmetry, its 
division upwards, proportion. 



18 BEAUTY. 

"Whether the agreeableness of symmetry be in any way 
referable to its expression of the Aristotelian (VoVrjg-, that is to 
say of abstract justice, I leave the reader to determine ; I only 
assert respecting it, that it is necessary to the dignity of every 
form, and that by the removal of it we shall render the other 
elements of beauty comparatively ineffectual : though, on the 
other hand, it is to be observed that it is rather a mode of 
arrangement of qualities than a quality itself; and hence sym- 
metry has little power over the mind, unless all the other con- 
stituents of beauty be found together with it. 



V. — ^PUEITY. 



There is one quality which might have escaped us in the 
consideration of mere matter, namely purity, and yet I think 
that the original notion of this quality is altogether mateiial, 
and has only been attributed to color A^■hen such color is sug- 
gestive of the condition of matter from which we originally 
received the idea. For I see not in the abstract how one 
color should be considered purer than another, except as more 
or less compounded, whereas there is certaualy a sense of 
purity or impurity m the most compound and neutral colors, 
as well as in the simplest, a quality difficult to define, and 
which the reader will probably be surprised by my calling the 
type of energy, with which it has certainly little traceable 
connexion in the mind. 

The only idea which I think can be legitimately connected 
with purity of matter, is this of vital and energetic connex- 
ion among its particles, and the idea of Ibulness is essen- 
tially connected with dissolution and death. Thus the purity 



PURITY. 19 

of the rock, contrasted with the fouhiess of dust or mould, is 
expressed by the epithet " living," very singularly given in 
the rock, in almost all languages ; singularly I say, because 
life is almost the last attribute one would ascribe to stone, but 
for this visible energy and connexion of its particles ; and so 
of water as opposed to stagnancy. And I do not think that, 
however pm-e a powder or dust may be, the idea of beauty is 
ever connected with it, for it is not the mere purity, but the 
active condition of the substance which is desired, so that as 
soon as it shoots mto crystals, or gathers into effervescence, a 
sensation of active or real purity is received which was not 
felt in the calcined caput mortuum. 

The most lovely objects m nature are only jDartially trans- 
parent. I suppose the utmost possible sense of beauty (of 
color) is conveyed by a feebly translucent, smooth, but not 
lustrous surface of white, and pale warm red, subdued by the 
most pure and delicate greys, as in the finer portions of the 
human fi-ame ; in wreaths of snow, and in white plumage 
under rose light. A fair forehead outshines its diamond dia- 
dem. The sparkle of the cascade withdraws not our eyes 
from the snowy summits in their evenmg silence. 

With the idea of purity comes that of sj)irituahty, for the 
essential characteristic of matter is its inertia, whence, by 
adding to it purity or energy, we may in some measure spi- 
ritualize even matter itself. Thus in the descriptions of the 
Apocalypse it is its purity that fits it for its place in heaven ; 
the river of the water of life that proceeds out of the throne 
of the Lamb is clear as crystal, and the pavement of the city 
is pure gold, like unto clear glass 



20 BEAUTT. 



VI. — MODEKATION. 



Of objects which, in respect of the qualities hitherto con- 
sidered, appear to have equal claims to regard, we find, never- 
theless, that certain are preferred to others in consequence of 
an attractive power, usually expressed by the terras " chaste- 
ness, refinement, or elegance," and it appears also that things 
which in other respects have little in them of natural beauty, 
and are of forms altogether simple and adapted to simple 
uses, are capable of much distinction and desirableness in con- 
sequence of these qualities only. It is of importance to dis- 
cover the real nature of the ideas thus expressed. 

Something of the peculiar meaning of the words is referable 
to the authority of fashion and the exclusiveness of pride, 
owing to which that which is the mode of a particular time is 
submissively esteemed, and that which by its costliness or its 
rarity is of difficult attainment, or in any way appears to have 
been chosen as the best of many things (which is the original 
sense of the words elegant and exquisite), is esteemed for the 
witness it bears to the dignity of the chooser. 

But neither of these ideas are in any way connected with 
eternal beauty, neither do they at all account for that agree- 
ableness of color and form which is especially termed chaste- 
ness, and which it would seem to be a characteristic of rightly 
trained mind in all things to prefer, and of common minds to 
reject. 

There is, however, another character of artificial produc- 
tions, to which these terms have partial reference, Avhich it is 
of some importance to note, that of finish, exactness, or 
refinement, which are commonly desired in the works of men, 
owing both to their difficulty of accomplishment and conse- 
quent expression of care and power. And there is not a 



MODERATION". 21 

greater sign of tlie imperfection of general taste, than ita 
capability of contentment with forms and things which, pro- 
fessing completion, are yet not exact nor complete, as in the 
vulgar vnih. wax and clay, and china figures, and in bad 
sculptors Avith an unfinished and clay-like modelling of sur- 
face, and curves and angles of no precision or deUcacy. Yet 
this finish is not a part or constituent of beauty, but the 
full and ultimate rendering of it. And therefore, as there 
certainly is admitted a difierence of degree in what we call 
chasteness, even in Divine work (compare the hollyhock or 
the sunflower with the vale Uly), we must seek for it some 
other explanation and source than this. 

And if, bringing down our ideas of it from compUcated 
objects to simple lines and colors, we analyze and regard 
them carefully, I think we shall be able to trace them to an 
under-current of constantly agreeable feeling, excited by the 
appearance in material things of a self-restrained liberty, that 
is to say, by the image of that acting of God with regard to 
all his creation, wherein, though free to operate in whatever 
arbitrary, sudden, violent, or inconstant ways he will, he yet, 
if we may reverently so speak, restrains in himself this his 
onmipotent liberty, and works always in consistent modes, 
called by us laws. And this restraint or moderation, accord- 
ing to the words of Hooker (" that which doth moderate the 
force and power, that which doth appoint the form and mea- 
sure of working, the same we term a law"), is in the Deity 
not restraint, such as it is said of creatures, but, as again says 
Hooker, " the very being of God is a law to his working," so 
that every appearance of painfulness or want of power and 
freedom in material things is wrong and ugly ; for the right 
restraint, the image of Divine operation, is both in thcra, and 
in men, a willing and not painful stopping short of the utmost 
degree to which their power might reach, and the appearance 



22 BEAUTY. 

of fettering or confinement is the cause of ugliness in the one, 
as the slightest painfulness or effort in restraint is a sign of sin 
in the other. 

I have put this attribute of beauty last, because I considei 
it the girdle and safeguard of all the rest, and in this respect 
the most essential of all, for it is possible that a certain degree 
of beauty may be attained even in the absence of one of its 
other constituents, as sometimes in some measure without 
symmetry or without unity. But the least appearance of 
violence or extravagance, of the want of moderation and 
restraint, is, I think, destructive of all beauty whatsoever in 
everything, color, form, motion, language, or thought, giving 
rise to that which in color we call glaring, in form inelegant, 
in motion ungraceful, in language coarse, in thought undis- 
ciplined, in all unchastened ; which qualities are in everything 
most painful, because the signs of disobedient and irregular 
ojDeration. 

In color it is not red, but rose-color, which is most beauti- 
ful, neither such actual green as we find in summer foliage, 
partly, and in our painting of it constantly; but such grey 
green as that into which nature modifies her distant tints, or 
such pale green and uncertain as we see in sunset sky, and 
in the clefts of the glacier, and the chrysoprase, and the sea- 
foam. And so of all colors ; not that they may not sometimes 
be deep and full, but that there is a solemn moderation even 
in their very fulness, and a holy reference beyond and out of 
their owai nature to great harmonies by which they are go- 
verned, and in obedience to which is their glory. The very 
brilliancy and real power of all color is dependent on the chas- 
I tening of it, as of a voice on its gentleness, and as of action on 
its calmness, and as all moral vigor on self-command. And 
therefore as that virtue which men last, and with most difii- 
culty attain unto, and which many attain not at all, and yetj 



MODEEATION. 2'3 

that which is essential to the conduct and ahnost to the being 
of all other virtues, since neither imagination, nor invention, 
nor industry, nor sensibility, nor energy, nor any other good 
having, is of full avail without this of self-command, whereby 
works truly masculine and mighty, are produced, and by the 
signs of which they are separated from that lower host of 
things brilliant, magnificent, and redundant, and farther ye^ 
from that of the loose, the lawless, the exaggerated, the inso- 
lent, and the profane, I would have the necessity of it fore- 
most among all our inculcating, and the name of it largest 
among all our inscribing, in so far that, over the doors of 
every school of Art, I would have this one word, relieved out 
in deep letters of pure gold, — moderatiox. 

I proceed more particularly to examine the nature of that 
second kind of beauty of which I spoke as consisting in " the 
appearance of felicitous fulfilment of function in livmg things." 
I have already noticed the example of very pure and high 
typical beauty which is to be found in the lines and gradations 
of unsuUied snow : If, passing to the edge of a sheet of it, 
upon the lower Alps, early in May, we find, as we are nearly 
sure to find, two or three little round ojaenings pierced in it, and 
through these emergent, a slender, pensive, fragile flower* 
whose small, dark, purple-fringed bell hangs down and shudders 
over the icy cleft that it has cloven, as if partly wondering at its 
own recent grave, and partly dying of very fatigue after its 
hard won victory ; we shall be, or we ought to be, moved by 
a totally difierent impression of loveliness from that which we 
receive among the dead ice and the idle clouds. There U now 
uttered to us a call for sympathy, now offered to us an image 
of moral purpose and achievement, which, however unconscious 
or senseless the creature may indeed be that so seems to call, 
cannot be heard without affection, nor contemplated ^dthout 
* Soldanella Alpina. 



24 BEAUTT. 

worship, by any of us whose heart is rightly tuned, or whose 
mind is clearly and surely sighted. 

Throughout the whole of the organic creation every being 
in a perfect state exhibits certain appearances, or evidences, of 
happiness, and besides is in its nature, its desires, its modes 
of nourishment, habitation, and death, illustrative or expressive 
of certain moral dispositions or principles. Now, first, in the 
keenness of the sympathy which we feel ia the happiness, real 
or apparent, of all organic beings, and which, as we shall 
presently see, invariably prompts us, from the joy we have in 
it, to look upon those as most lovely which are most happy ; 
and secondly, in the justness of the moral sense which rightly 
reads the lesson they are all intended to teach, and classes them 
in orders of worthiness and beauty according to the rank and 
nature of that lesson, whether it be of warning or example. 

Its first perfection, therefore, relating to vital beauty, is the 
kindness and unselfish fuhiess of heart, which receives the 
utmost amount of pleasure from the happiness of all things. 
Of which in high degree the heart of man is incapable, neither 
what intense enjoyment the angels may have in all that they 
see of things that move and live, and in the part they take in 
the shedding of God's kindness upon them, can we know or 
conceive : only in proportion as we draw near to God, and are 
made in measure like unto him, can we increase this our posses- 
sion of charity, of which the entire essence is in God only. 

Wherefore it is evident that even the ordinary exercise of 
this faculty impUes a condition of the whole moral being in 
Bome measure right and healthy, and that to the entire exercise 
of it there is necessary the entire perfection of the Christian 
character, for he who loves not God, nor his brother, cannot 
love the srass beneath his feet and the creatures that fill those 
spaces in the universe which he needs not, and which live not 
for his uses ; nay, he has seldom grace to be grateful even to 



BEAUTY IN ANIMALS. 25 

those that love him and serve him, while, on the other hand, 
none can love God nor his hmnan brother without loving all 
things which his Father loves, nor without looking upon them 
every one as in that respect his brethren also, and perhajDs 
worthier than he, if in the mider concords they have to fill, 
their part is touched more truly. 

For it is matter of easy demonstration, that setting the 
characters of tyjiical beauty aside, the pleasure afforded by 
every organic form is in proportion to its appearance of healthy 
vital energy ; as in a rose bush, setting aside all the consider- 
ations of gradated flushing of color and fair folding of line, 
which it shares with the cloud or the snow-wreath, we find in 
and through all this certain signs pleasant and acceptable as 
signs of life and enjoyment in the particular individual plant 
itself Every leaf and stalk is seen to have a function, to be 
constantly exercising that function, and as it seems solely for 
the good and enjoyment of the plant. 



BEAUTY IN ANIMALS. 



Of eyes we shall find those ugliest which have in them 
no expression nor life whatever, but a corpse-like stare, or 
an indefinite meaningless glaring, as in some lights, those of 
owls and cats, and mostly of insects and of all creatures in 
M'hich the eye seems rather an external, optical instrument 
than a bodily member through which emotion and virtue of 
soul may be expressed (as pre-eminently in the chameleon), 
because the seeming want of sensibility and vitality in a liv- 
ing creature is the most painful of all wants. And next to 



26 BEAUTY. 

these in ugliness come the eyes that gain vitality i^ideed, but 
only by means of the expression of intense malignity, as in 
the serpent and alligator ; and next to these, to whose malig- 
nity is added the virtue of subtlety and keenness, as of the 
lynx and hawk ; and then, by diminishing the malignity and 
increasing the exjiressions of comprehensiveness and determi- 
nation, we arrive at those of the lion and eagle, and at last, 
by destroying malignity altogether, at the fair eye of the 
herbivorous tribes, wherein the superiority of beaiity consists 
always in the greater or less sweetness and gentleness prima- 
rily, as in the gazelle, camel, and ox, and in the greater or 
less intellect, secondarily, as in the horse and dog, and finally, 
in gentleness and intellect both in man. And again, taking 
the mouth, another source of expression, we find it ugliest 
where it has none, as mostly in fish, or perhaps where, with- 
out gaining much m expression of any kind, it becomes a for- 
midable destructive instrument, as again in the alligator, and 
then, by some increase of expression, we arrive at birds' 
beaks, wherein there is more obtained by the different ways 
of setting on the mandibles than is commonly supposed (com- 
pare the bills of the duck and the eagle), and thence we reach 
the finely-developed lij^s of the carnivora, which nevertheless 
lose that beauty they have, in the actions of snarling and 
biting, and from these we j^ass to the nobler because gentler 
and more sensible, of the horse, camel, and fawn, and so 
again up to man, only there is less traccableness of the prin- 
ciple in the mouths of the lower animals, because they are in 
slight measure oily capable of expression, and chiefly used as 
instruments, and that of low function, whereas in man the 
mouth is given most definitely as a moans of expression, 
beyond and above its lower functions. 

We are to take it for granted, that every creature of God 
is in some way good, and has a duty and specific operation 



HUMAN BEAUXy. 27 

providentially accessory to the ■well-being of all ; we are to 
look in this foith to that emplopnent and nature of each, and 
to derive pleasure from their entire perfection and fitness for 
the duty they have to do, and in their entire fulfilment of it ; 
and so we are to take pleasure and find beauty in the magni- 
ficent binding together of the jaws of the ichthyosaurus for 
catching and holding, and in the adaptation of the lion for 
springing, and of the locust for destroying, and of the lark 
for singing, and in e^ery creature for the doing of that which 
God has made it to do. 



HUMAN BEAUTY. 



We come at last to set ourselves face to face with our- 
selves, expecting that in creatures made after the image of 
God we are to find comehness and completion more exquisitg 
than in the fowls of the air and the things that pass through 
the paths of the sea. 

But behold now a sudden change from all former experi- 
ence. No longer among the individuals of the race is there 
equality or hkeness, a distributed fairness and fixed type visi- 
ble in each, but evil diversity, and terrible stamp of various 
degradation ; features seamed with sickness, dimmed by sen- 
suality, convulsed by passion, pinched by poverty, shadowed 
by sorrow, branded with remorse ; bodies consumed with 
sloth, broken down by labor, tortured by disease, dishonored 
in foul uses ; intellects Avithout power, hearts without hope, 
minds earthly and devilish ; our bones full of the sin of our 
youth, the heaven revealing our iniquity, the earth rising 



28 BEAUTY. 

up against us, the roots dried up beneath, and the branch cut 
off above ; well for us only, if, after beholding this our natu- 
ral face in a glass, Ave desire not straightway to forget what 
manner of men we be. 

Herein there is at last something, and too much, for that 
short, stopping intelligence and dull perception of ours to 
accomj^lish, whether in earnest fact, or in the seeking for the 
outwai'd image of beauty : — to undo the devil's work, to re- 
store to the body the grace and the power which inherited 
disease has destroyed, to return to the spirit the purity, and 
to the intellect the grasp that they had m Paradise. Now, 
first of all, this work, be it observed, is in no respect a work 
of imagination. Wrecked we are, and nearly all to pieces ; 
but that little good by which we are to redeem ourselves is 
to be got out of the old wreck, beaten about and full of sand 
though it be ; and not out of that desert island of pride on 
which the devils split first, and we after them : and so the 
only restoration of the body that we can reach is not to be 
coined out of our fancies, but to be collected out of such 
uninjured and bright vestiges of the old seal as we can find 
and set together ; and so the ideal of the features, as the good 
and perfect soul is seen in them, is not to be reached by ima- 
gination, but by the seeing and reaching forth of the better 
part of the soul to that of which it must first know the sweet- 
ness and goodness in itself, before it can much desire, or 
rightly find, the signs of it in others. 

The operation of the mind upon the body, and evidence of 
t tliereon, may be considered imder three heads : — 

First, the intellectual powers upon the features, m the fine 
cutting and chiselling of them, and removal from them of signs 
of sensuality and sloth, by which they are blunted and dead- 
ened, and substitution of energy and intensity for vacancy 
and insipidity (by which wants alone the faces of many fair 



HUMAN BEAUTY. 29 

women are utterly spoiled, and rendered valueless), and by the 
keenness given to the eye, and fine moulding and development 
to the brow. 

The second point to be considered in the influence of mind 
upon body, is the mode of operation and conjunction of the 
moral feelings on and with the mtellectual powers, and then 
their conjoint influence on the bodily form. Now, the opera- 
tion of the right moral feelings on the intellectual is always 
for the good of the latter, for it is not possible that selfish- 
ness should reason rightly in any respect, but must be blind in 
its estimation of the worthiness of all things, neither anger, 
for that overpowers the reason or outcries it, neither sensu- 
ality, for that overgrows and chokes it, neither agitation, for 
that has no time to compare things together, neither enmity, 
for that must be unjust, neither fear, for that exaggerates all 
things, neither cunning and deceit, for that which is volun- 
tarily untrue wiU soon be unwittingly so : but the great rea- 
soners are self-command, and trust unagitated, and deep-look- 
ing Love, and Faith, which, as she is above Reason, so she 
best holds the i*eins of it from her high seat : so that they err 
gi'ossly who think of the right development even of the intel- 
lectual type as possible, unless we look to higher sources of 
beauty first. For there is not any virtue the exercise of 
which, even momentarily, will not impress a new fairness upon 
the features ; neither on them only, but on the whole body, 
both the intelligence and the moi*al faculties have operation, 
for even all the movement and gestures, however slight, are 
diflferent in their modes according to the mind that governs 
them, and on the gentleness and decision of just feeling there 
follows a grace of action, and through continuance of this 
a grace of form, which by no discipline may be taught or 
attained. 

The third point to be considered with respect to the cor. 



30 BEAUTY. 

poreal expression of mental character is, that there is a cer- 
tain period of the soul culture when it begins to interfere 
with some of the characters of typical beauty belonging to the 
bodily frame, the stirring of the intellect wearing down the 
flesh, and the moral enthusiasm burning its way out to hear 
ven, through the emaciation of the earthen vessel ; and that 
there is, in this indication of subduing of the mortal by the 
immortal part, an ideal glory of perhaps a purer and higher 
range than that of the more perfect material form. We con- 
ceive, I think, more nobly of the weak presence of Paul than 
of the fair and ruddy countenance of Daniel. 

The love of the human race is increased by their individual 
differences, and the unity of the creature made perfect by 
each having something to bestow and to receive, bound to the 
rest by a thousand various necessities and various gratitudes, 
humility in each rejoicing to admire in his fellow that which 
he finds not m himself, and each being in some respect the 
complement of his race. 

In investigating the signs of the ideal, or perfect type of 
humanity, we must distinguish between differences conceiv- 
ably existing in a perfect state, and differences resulting from 
immediate and present operation of the Adamite curse. 

As it is impossible that any essence short of the Divine, 
should at the same instant be equally receptive of all emotions, 
those emotions which, by right and order, have the most 
usual victory,/ both leave the stamp of then- habitual presence 
on the body, and render the individual more and more suscep- 
tible of them in proportion to the frequency of their pre- 
valent recurrence ; added to which, causes of distmctive cha- 
racter are to be taken into account, the differences of age and 
sex, wliich, though seemingly of more finite influence, cannot 
be banished from any human conception. David, ruddy and 
of a fair countenance, with the brook stone of deliverance in 



^- 



nViW^ BEAUTY. 31 

his hand, is not more ideal than David leaning on the old age 
of Barzillai, returning chastened to his kingly home. And 
they who are as the angels of God in heaven, yet cannot be 
conceived as so assimilated that their different experiences 
and affections upon earth shall then be forgotten and effect 
less : the child taken early to his place cannot be imagined to 
wear there such a body, nor to have such thoughts, as the 
glorified apostle who has finished his course and kept the 
fixith on earth. And so whatever perfections and likeness of 
love we may attribute to either the tried or the crowned 
creatures, there is the difference of the stars in glory among 
them yet ; differences of original gifts, though not of occupy- 
ing till their Lord come, different dispensations of trial and of 
trust, of sorrow and support, both in their own inward, vari- 
able hearts, and in their positions of exposure or of peace, of 
the gourd shadow and the smiting sun, of calling at heat of 
day or eleventh hour, of the house unroofed by faith, and the 
clouds opened by revelation ; differences in warnkig, m mer- 
cies, in sicknesses, in signs, in time of calling to account ; like 
only they all are by that which is not of them, but the gift of 
God's unchangeable mercy. " I will give unto this last even 
as unto thee." 

/ Those signs of evil which are commonly most manifest on 
the human features are I'oughly divisible into these four kinds : 
the signs of pride, of sensuality, of fear, and of cruelty. Any 
one of which will destroy the ideal character of the counte- 
nance and body. 

Now of these, the first, pride, is perhaps the most destruc- 
tive of all the four, seeing it is the undermost and original 
story of all sin. 

The second destroyer of human beauty, is the appearance 
of sensual character, more difficult to trace, owing to its 
peculiar subtlety. 



32 BEAUTY. 

" Of all God's works, which doe this worlde adom, 
There is no one more faire, and excellent 
Than is man's body both for power and form© 
"Whiles it is kept in sober government. 
But none than it more foul and indecent 
Distempered through misrule and passions bace." 

Respecting those two other vices of the human face, the 
expressions of fear and ferocity, these only occasionally enter 
into the conception of character. 

Among the children of God, while there is always that fearflil 
and bowed apprehension of his majesty, and that sacred dread 
of all offence to him, which is called the fear of God, yet of 
real and essential fear there is not any, but clinging of confi- 
dence to him, as their Rock, Fortress, and Deliverer, and perfect 
love, and casting out of fear, so that it is not possible that while 
the mind is rightly bent on him, there should be dread of 
anything either earthly or supernatural, and the more dreadful 
seems the height of his majesty, the less fear they feel that 
dwell in the shadow of it (" Of whom shall I be afraid ?") so 
that they are as David was, devoted to his fear ; whereas, on 
the other hand, those who, if they may help it, never conceive 
of God, but thrust away all thought and memory of him, and 
in his real terribleness and omnipresence fear him not nor know 
him, yet are of real, acute, piercing, and ignoble fear, haunted 
for evermore ; fear inconceiving and desperate that calls to the 
rocks, and hides in the dust ; and hence the peculiar baseness 
of the expression of terror, a baseness attributed to it in all 
times, and among all nations, as of a passion atheistical, brutal, 
and profane. So also, it is always joined with ferocity, which 
is of all passions the least human ; for of sensual desires there is 
license to men, as necessity ; and of vanity there is intellectual 
cause, so that when seen in a brute it is pleasant, and a sign of 
good wit ; and of fear there is at times necessity and excuse, 



HUMAN BEAUTY. 33 

as being allowed for prevention of harm ; but of ferocitj tbere 
is no excuse nor palliation, but it is pure essence of tiger and 
demon, and it casts on the human face the paleness alike of the 
horse of Death, and the ashes of hell. 

These, then, ai'e the four passions whose presence in any 
degree on the human face is degradation. But of all passion 
it is to be generally observed, that it becomes ignoble either 
when entertained respecting unworthy objects, and therefore 
shallow or unjustifiable, or when of impious violence, and so 
destructive of hunian dignity. Thus grief is noble or the 
reverse, according to the dignity and worthiness of the object 
lamented, and the grandeur of the mind enduring it. The 
sorrow of mortified vanity or avarice is simply disgusting, even 
that of bereaved affection may be base if selfish and unre- 
strained. All grief that convulses the features is ^j^oble, 
because it is commonly shallow and certainly temporary, as in 
children, though in the shock and shiver of a strong man's fea- 
tures under sudden and violent grief there may be something of 
sublime. 

" That beauty is not, as fond men misdeem 
An outward show of things, that only seem ; 
But that fair lamp, from whose celestial ray 
That light proceeds, which kindleth lovers' fire, 
Shall never be extinguished nor decay. 
Bnt when the vital spirits do expire, 
Unto her native planet shall retire. 
For it is heavenly born and cannot die, 
Being a parcel of the purest sky." 



34 BEAUTY. 



THE IDEAL. 



The perfect idea of the form and condition in which all the 
properties of the species are fully developed, is called the ideal 
of the species. The question of the nature of ideal conception 
ef species, and of the mode in which the mind arrives at it, 
has been the subject of so much discussion, and source of so 
mtfch embarrassment, chiefly owing to that unfortunate distinc- 
tion between idealism and realism which leads most people to 
imagine the ideal opposed to the real, and therefore false^ that 
iVhink it necessary to request the reader's most careful attention 
to the following positions. 

AnY^ork of art which represents, not a material object, but 
the rflptal conception of a material object, is in the primary 
sense of the word ideal ; that is to say, it represents an idea, 
and not a thing. Any woi'k of art Avhich represents or realizes 
a material object, is, in the primary sense of the term, unideal. 

Ideal works of art, therefore, in this first sense, represent the 
result of an act of imagination, and are good or bad in pro- 
portion to the healthy condition and general power of the 
imagination, whose acts they represent. 

Unideal works of art (the studious production of which is 
termed realism) represent actual existing things, and are good 
or bad in proportion to the perfection of the representation. 

All entirely bad works of art may be divided into those which, 
professing to be imaginative, bear no stamp of imagination, and 
are therefore false, and those which professing to be represen- 
tative of matter, miss of the representation and are therefore 
nugatory. 

The ideal, therefore, of the park oak is full size, united 
terminal curve, equal and symmetrical range of branches on 
each side. The ideal of the moimtain oak may be anything, 



THE IDEAL, 35 

twi)5ting, and leaning, and shattered, and i-ock-encumbered, so 
only that amidst all its misfortunes, it maintain the dignity of 
oak ; and, indeed, I look upon this kind of tree as more ideal 
than the other, in so far as by its efforts and struggles, more 
of its nature, enduring power, patience in waiting for, and 
ingenuity in obtaining what it wants, is brought out, and so 
more of the essence of oak exhibited, than under more fortu- 
nate conditions. 

The ranunculus glacialis might perhaps, by cultivation, be 
blanched from its wan and corpse-like paleness to purer vhite, 
and won to more branched and lofty development of its raggei^ 
leaves. But the ideal of the plant is to be found only in the 
last, loose stones of the moraine, alone there ; wet with the 
cold, unkindly drip of the glacier water, and trembUng^ as the 
loose and steep dust to which it clings yields ever and anon, and 
shudders and crumbles away from about its root. 

And if it be asked how this conception of the utmost beauty 
of ideal form is consistent with what we formerly argued 
respecting the pleasantness of the appearance of felicity in the 
creature, let it be observed, and for ever held, that the right and 
true happiness of every creature, is in this very discharge of 
its function, and in those efforts by which its strength and 
inherent energy are developed : and that the repose of which 
we also spoke as necessary to all beauty, is, as was then stated, 
repose not of inanition, nor of luxury, nor of irresolution, but 
the repose of magnificent energy and being; in action, the 
calmness of trust and determination ; in rest, the consciousness 
of duty accomplished and of victory won, and this repose and 
this felicity can take place as well in the midst of trial and 
tempest, as beside the waters of comfort ; they perish only 
when the creature is either unfaithful to itself, or is afflicted by 
circumstances imnatural and maUgnant to its being, and for the 
contending with which it was neither fitted nor ordained. 



36 BEAUTY. 

Hence that rest which is indeed glorious is of the chamois 
couched breathless on his gi'anite bed, not of the stalled ox over 
his fodder; and that happiness which is indeed beautiful is in the 
bearing of those trial tests which are appointed for the proving 
of every creature, whether it be good, or whether it be evil. 
Of all creatures whose existence involves birth, progress, and 
dissolution, ideality is predicable all through their existence, so 
that they be perfect with reference to their supposed period of 
being. Thus there is an ideal of infancy, of youth, of old age, 
of death, and of decay. But when the ideal form of the species 
js spoken of or conceived in general terms, the form is under- 
stood to be of that period when the generic attributes are 
perfectly developed, and previous to the commencement of 
their decline. At which period all the characters of vital and 
typical beauty are commonly most concentrated in them, though 
the arrangement and proportion of these characters varies at 
different periods, youth having more of the vigorous beauty, 
and age of the reposmg; youth of typical outward fairness, and 
age of expanded and etherealized moral expression ; the babe, 
again, in some measure atoning in gracefulness for its want of 
strength, so that the balanced glory of the creature continues 
in solemn interchange, perhaps even 

" Filling more and more with crystal light, 
As pensive evening deepens into night." 

/ Our purity of taste is best tested by its universality. If we 
can only admire this thing or that, we may be sure that our 
cause for liking is of a finite and false nature. But if we can 
perceive beauty in everything of God's doing, we may argue 
that we have reached the true perception of its universal laws. 
Hence, false taste may be known by its fastidiousness, by its 
demands of pomp, splendor, and unusual combination ; by its 
enjoyment only of particular styles and modes of things, and 



THE IDEAL. 37 

by its pride also, for it is for ever meddling, mending, accumu- 
lating, and self-exulting, its eye is always upon itself, and it 
tests all things around it by the way they fit it. But true 
taste is for ever growing, learning, reading, worshipping, lay- 
ing its hand upon its mouth because it is astonished, casting 
its shoes from off its feet because it finds all ground holy, 
lamenting over itself, and testing itself by the way that it fits 
things. And it finds whereof to feed, and whereby to grow, 
in all things, and therefore the complaint so often made by 
young artists that they have not within then* reach materials, 
or siibjects enough for their fancy, is utterly groundless, and 
the sign only of their own blindness and inefficiency; for there 
is that to be seen in every street and lane of every city — that 
to be felt and found in every human heart and countenance, 
that to be loved in every road-side weed and moss-grown wall, 
which, in the hands of faithful men, may convey emotions of 
glory and sublimity, continual and exalted. 



|3art 2 
NATURE. 



" Nature never did betray 
The heart that loved lier; 'tis her privilege, 
Through all the years of this our life, to lead 
From jo3' to joy; for she can so inform 
The mind that is within us, so impress 
With quietness and beauty, and so feed 
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, 
Rasli judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men 
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb 
Our cheerful faith that all which we behold 
Is full of blessings." 

WOUDSWORTH. 



|3art 2. 

NATURE. 
THE SKY. 

It is a strange thing how little in general people know 
about the sky. It is the part of creation in Avhich nature has 
done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and 
evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in 
any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least 
attend to her. There are not many of her other works in 
which some more material or essential purpose than the mere 
pleasing of man is not answered by every part of their organ- 
ization ; but every essential purpose of the sky might, so far 
as we know, be answered, if once in three days, or there- 
abouts, a great ugly black rain cloud were brought up over 
the blue, and everything well watered, and so all left blue 
again till next time, with perhaps a film of morning and even- 
ing mist for dew. And instead of this, there is not a moment 
of any day of our lives, when nature is not producing scene 
after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory, and work- 
ing still upon such exquisite and constant principles of the 
most perfect beauty, that it is quite certain it is all done for 
us, and intended for our perpetual pleasure. And every man, 
wherever placed, however far from other sources of interest 
or of beauty, has this doing for him constantly. The noblest 
scenes of the earth can be seen and known but by few ; it is 
not intended that man should live always in the midst of 



42 NATUKE. 

them, he injures tliem by his presence, he ceases to feel thera 
if he be always with them ; but the sky is for all ; bright as it 
is, it is not " too bright, nor good, for human nature's daily 
food ;" it is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort 
and exalting of the heart, for the soothing it and purifying it 
from its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capri- 
cious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments 
together ; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its 
tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, its appeal to what is 
immortal in us, is as distinct, as its ministry of chastisement or 
of t)lessing to what is mortal is essential. And yet we nev^jr 
attend to it, we never make it a subject of thought, but as it 
has to do Avith our animal sensations; w^e look upon all by 
which it speaks to us more clearly than to brutes, upon all 
which bears witness to the intention of the Supreme, that we 
are to receive more from the covering vault than the light 
and the dew which we share with the weed and the Avorm, 
only as a succession of meaningless and monotonous accident, 
too common and too vain to be worthy of a moment of watch- 
fulness, or a glance of admu'ation. If in our moments of utter 
idleness and insipidity, we turn to the sky as a last resource, 
which of its j^henomena do we speak of? One says it has 
been w^et, and another it has been wmdy, and another it has 
been warm. Who, among the whole chattering crowd, can 
tell me of the forms and the precipices of the chain of tall 
white mountains that girded the horizon at noon yesterday ? 
Who saw the narrow sunbeam that came out of the south and 
smote upon their summits untU they melted and mouldered ^ 
away in a dust of blue rain ? ^Who saw the dance of the dead ' 
clouds when the sunlight left them last night, and the west 
wind blew them before it like withered leaves? All has 
passed, unregretted as unseen ; or if the apathy be ever 
shaken off. even for an instant, it is only by what is gross, or 



THE SKY. 43 

what is extraordinary; and yet it is not in the broad and 
fierce manifestations of the elemental energies, not in the clash 
of the hail, nor the drift of the whirlwind, that the highest 
characters of the sublime are developed. God is not in the 
earthquake, nor in the fire, but in the still small voice. They 
are but the blunt and low faculties of our nature, Avhich can 
only be addressed through lampblack and lightning. It is in 
quiet and subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty, the deep, 
and the calm, and the perpetual, — that which must be sought 
ere it is seen, and loved ere it is understood, — ^things which 
the angels work out for us daily, and yet vary eternally, which 
are never wanting, and never repeated, which are to be found 
always yet each found but once ; it is through these that the 
lesson of devotion is chiefly taught, and the blessing of beauty 
given. These are what the artist of highest aim must study ; 
it is these, by the combination of wliich his ideal is to be 
created ; these, of which so little notice is ordinarily taken 
by common observers, that I fully believe, little as people in 
general are concerned with art, more of their ideas of sky are 
derived from pictures than from reality, and that if we could 
examine the conception formed in the minds of most educated 
persons when we talk of clouds, it would frequently be foimd 
composed of fragments of blue and white reminiscences of the 
old masters. 

" The chasm of sky above my head 
Is Heaven's profoundest azsare. No domain 
Fo^ fickle, short-hved clouds, to occupy, 
"> to pass through ; but rather an abyss 
In whicli the everlasting stars abide, 
And whose soft gloom, and boundless depth, might tempt 
The curious eye to look for them by day." 

And, in his American Notes, I remember Dickens notices the 
same truth, describing himself as lying drowsily on the barge 



44 NATUEE. 

deck, looking not at, but through the sky. And if you look 
intensely at the pure blue of a serene sky, you will see that 
there is a variety and fulness in its very repose. It is not flat 
dead color, but a deep, quivering, transparent body of pene- 
trable air, in which you trace or imagine short, falling spots 
of deceiving hght, and dim shades, faint, veiled vestiges of 
dark vapor. 

It seems to me that in the midst of the material nearness 
of the heavens God means us to acknowledge His own imme- 
diate presence as visitmg, judging, and blessing us. "The 
earth shook, the heavens also dropped, at the presence of 
God." " He doth set his bow in the cloud," and thus renews, 
in the sound of every drooping swathe of rain, his promises of 
everlasting love. " In them hath he set a tabernacle for the 
sun ;" whose burning ball, which without the firmament would 
be seen as an intolerable and scorching circle in the blackness 
of vacuity, is by that firmament surrounded with gorgeous 
service, and tempered by mediatorial ministries; by the fir- 
mament of clouds the golden pavement is spread for his 
chariot wheels at morning ; by the firmament of clouds the 
temple is built for his presence to fill with light at noon ; by 
the firmament of clouds the purple veil is closed at evening 
round the sanctuary of his rest ; by the mists of the firmament 
his implacable hght is divided, and its separated fierceness 
appeased into the soft blue that fills the depth of distance with 
its bloom, and the flush with which the mountains burn as they 
drink the overflowing of the dayspring. And in this taber- 
nacling of the unendurable sun with men, through tlie shadows 
of the firmament, God would seem to set forth the stooping 
of His own majesty to men, upon the throne of the fii-mament. 
As the Creator of all the worlds, and the Inhabiter of eternity, 
we cannot behold Him ; but as the Judge of the earth and 
the Preserver of men, those heavens are indeed His dwelling 



CLOUDS. 45 

place. " SAvear not, neither by heaven, for it is God's throne ; 
nor by the earth, for it is his footstool." And all those pass- 
ings to and fro of fruitful shower and grateful shade, and all 
those visions of silver palaces built about the horizon, and 
voices of moaning winds and threatenmg thunders, and glories 
of colored robe and cloven ray, are but to deepen in our 
hearts the acceptance, and distinctness, and dearness of the 
simple words, " Our Father, which art in heaven." 



CLOUDS. 

The first and most important character of clouds, is depen 
dent on the different altitudes at which they are formed. 
The atmosphere may be conveniently considered as divided 
into three spaces, each inhabited by clouds of specific charac- 
ter altogether different, though, in reality, there is no distinct 
limit fixed between them by nature, clouds being formed at 
every altitude, and partaking, according to their altitude, more 
or less of the characters of the upper or lower regions. The 
scenery of the sky is thus formed of an infinitely graduated 
series of systematic forms of clouds, each of which has its own 
region in Avhich alone it is formed, and each of which has 
specific charactei's which can only be properly determined by 
comparing them as they are found clearly distinguished by 
intervals of considerable space. I shall therefore consider the 
sky as divided into three regions — the upper region, or region 
of the cirrus ; the central region, or region of the stratus ; the 
lower region, or the region of the rain-cloud. 

The clouds which I wish to consider as included in the up- 
per roL^ion, never touch even the highest mountains of Europe, 



46 NATURE. 

.and^may therefore be looked upon as never formed below an 
ele%*ation of at least 15,000 feet; they are the motionless mnl- 
titudinous lines of delicate vapor with which the blue of the 
open sky is commonly streaked or speckled after several days 
of fine weather. I must be pardoned for givhig a detailed 
description of their specific characters, as they are of constant 
occurrence in the works of modern artists, and I shall have 
occasion to speak frequently of them in future parts of the 
work. Their chief characters are — 

First, S}inmetry : they are nearly always arranged in some 
definite and evident order, commonly in long ranks, reaching 
sometimes from the zenith to the horizon, each rank composed 
of an infinite number of transverse bars of about the same 
length, each bar thickest in the middle, and termmating in a 
traceless vaporous point at each side; the ranks are in the 
direction of the wind, and the bars of course at right angles to 
it. The groups of fine, silky, parallel fibres, termhiating in a 
plumy sAveep, are vulgarly known as " mares' tails." 

Secondly, Sharpness of Edge : The edges of the bars of the 
npper clouds which are turned to the wind are often the 
sharpest which the sky shows; no outline whatever' of any 
other kind of cloud, however marked and energetic, ever ap- 
proaches the delicate decision of those edges. 

Thirdly, Multitude : The delicacy of these vapors is some- 
times carried into an infinity of diAision. Nor is nature con. 
tent with an infinity of bars or lines alone — each bar is in 
its turn severed into a number of small undulatory masses, 
more or less connected according to the violence ofthe wind. 
When this division is merely eflected by undulation, the cloud 
exactly resembles searsand ribbed by the tide ; but when the 
division amounts to real separation we have the mottled or 
" mackerel" skies, 
t" Fourthly, Purity of Color : The nearest of these clouds-^ 



CLOUDS. 47 

those over the observer's head, being at least three miles 
above him, , and nearly all entering the ordinary sphere of 
vision, farther from him still, — their dark sides are much 
grayer and cooler than those of other clouds, owing to their 
distance. They are composed of the purest aqueous vapor, 
free from all foulness of earthy gases, and of this in the 
lightest and most ethereal state in which it can be, to be 
visible. Farther, they receive the light of the sun in a state 
of far greater intensity than lower objects, the beams being 
transmitted to them through atmospheric air far less dense, 
and Avholly unaffected by mist, smoke, or any other impurity. 
Hence their colors are more pure and vivid, and their white 
less sullied than those of any other clouds. 

Lastly, Variety : Variety is never so conspicuous, as when 
it is imited with symmetry. The perpetual change of form in 
other clouds, is monotonous in its very dissimilarity, nor is 
difference striking where no connection is implied ; but if 
through a range of barred clouds, crossing half the heaven, 
all governed by the same forces and falling into one gene- 
ral form, there be yet a marked and evident dissimilarity 
between each member of the great mass — one more finely 
drawn, the next more delicately moulded, the next more 
gracefully bent — each broken into differently modelled and 
variously numbered groups, tlie variety is doubly striking, 
because contrasted with the pei'fect symmetry of which it 
forms a part. 

Under all, perhaps the massy outline of some lower cloud 
moves heavily across the motionless buoyancy of the upper 
lines, and indicates at once their elevation and their repose. 

A fine and faithful description of these clouds is given by 
Wordsworth in " The Excursion." 

"But raj's of light 
Now suddenly diverging from the orb, 



48 NATURE. 

• 

Retired behind the niountaia top.s, or veiled 

By the dense air, shot upwards to the crown 

Of the blue firmament — aloft — and wide : 

And multitudes of little floating clouds, 

Ere we, who saw, of change were conscious, pierced 

Through their ethereal texture, had become 

Vivid as fire, — Clouds separately poised, 

Innumerable multitude of forms 

Scattered through half the circle of the sky ; 

And giving back, and shedding each on each, 

"With prodigal communion, the bright hues 

Which from the unapparent fount of glory 

They had imbibed, and ceased not to receive. 

That which the heavens displayed the liquid deep 

Repeated, but with unity sublime." 

Their slow movement Shelley has beautifully touched — 

" Underneath the young gray dawn 
A multitude of dense, white fleecy clouds, 
"Were wandering in thick flocks along the mountains, 
Shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind." 

If you watch for the next sunset, Avhen there are a consider- 
able number of these cirri in the sky^ you will see, especially 
at the zenith, that the sky does not remain of the same color 
for two inches together; one cloud has a dark side of cold 
blue, and a fringe of milky white ; another, above it, has a 
dark side of purple and an edge of red ; another, nearer the 
sun, has an under-side of orange and an edge of gold ; these 
you will find mingled with, and passing into the blue of the 
sky, which in places you will not be able to distinguish from 
the cool grey of the darker clouds, and which will be itself 
full of gradation, now pure and deep, now faint and feeble ; 
and all this is done, not in large j^icces, nor on a large scale, 
but over and over again in every square yard, so that tliere is 



THE CENTRAL CLOUD REGION. 49 

no single part nor portion of the whole sky which has not in 
itself variety of color enough for a separate picture, and yet 
no suigie part which is like another, or which has not some 
peculiar source of beauty, and some peculiar arrangement of 
color of its own. 



THE CENTRAL CLOUD REGION, 

I CONSIDER as including all clouds which are the usual cha- 
racteristic of ordinary serene weather, and which touch and 
envelope the mountains of Switzerland ; they may be consi- 
dered as occupying a space of air ten thousand feet in height, 
extending from five to fifteen thousand feet above the sea. 

These clouds, according to their elevation, appear with 
great variety of form, often partaking of the streaked or mot- 
tled character of the higher region, and as often, when the 
precursors of stonn, manifesting forms closely connected with 
the lowest rain clouds ; but the species especially character- 
istic of the central region is a white, ragged, irregular, and 
scattered vapor, which has Uttle form and less color. 

Rut although this kind of cloud is, as I have said, typical 
of the central region, it is not one which nature is fond of. 
She scarcely ever lets an hour pass without some manifesta- 
tion of finer forms, sometimes approaching the upper cirri, 
sometimes the lower cumulus. And then in the lower out- 
lines, we have the nearest approximation which nature ever 
presents to the clouds of Claude, Salvator, and Poussin. 
When vajDor collects into masses, it is partially rounded, 
clumsy, and ponderous, as if it would tumble out of the sky, 
shaded with a dull gray, and totally devoid of any appear- 



50 NATURE. 

ance of energy or motion. Even in nature, these clouds are 
comparatively uninteresting, scarcely worth raising our heads 
to look at ; and on canvas, valuable only as a means of intro- 
ducing light, and breaking the monotony of blue ; yet they 
are, perhaps, beyond all others the favorite clouds of the 
Dutch masters. 

The originality and vigor of separate conception in cloud 
forms, give to the scenery of the sky a force and variety no 
less delightful than that of the changes of mountain outline in 
a hill district of great elevation ; and there is added to this 
a spirit-like feeling, a capricious, mocking imagery of passi( n 
and life, totally different from any effects of inanimate form 
that the earth can show. 

The minor contours, out of which the larger outlines are 
composed, are indeed beautifully curvilinear ; but they are 
never monotonous in their curves. First comes a concave 
line, then a convex one, then an angular jag, breaking off 
into spray, then a downright straight line, then a curve again, 
then a deep gap, and a place where all is lost and melted 
away, and so on ; displaymg in every inch of the form re- 
newed and ceaseless invention, setting off grace Avith rigidity, 
and reheving flexibility with force, in a manner scarcely less 
admirable, and far more changeful than even hi the muscular 
forms of the human frame. Nay, such is the exquisite com- 
position of all this, that you may take any single fragment of 
any cloud in the sky, and you will find it put together as if 
there had been a year's thought over the plan of it, arranged 
with the most studied inequality — with the most delicate 
symmetry — with the most elaborate contrast, a picture in 
itself You may try every other piece of cloud in the heaven, 
and you will find them every one as perfect, anf] yet not one 
in the least like another. 

When rain falls on a mountain composed chiefly of barren 



THE CENTRAL CLOUD REGION. 51 

rocks, tlieir surfaces, being violently heated by the sun, whose 
most intense warmth always precedes rain, occasion sudden 
and violent evaporation, actually converting the first shower 
into steam. Consequently, upon all such hills, on the com- 
mencement of rain, white volumes of vapor are instantaneous- 
ly and universally formed, which rise, are absorbed by the 
atmosphere, and again descend in rain, to rise in fresh volumes 
until the surfaces of the hills are cooled. Where there is 
grass or vegetation, this effect is diminished ; where there is 
fohage it scarcely takes place at all. 'Now this efiect has evi- 
dently been especially chosen by Turner for Loch Coriskin, 
not only because it enabled him to relieve its jagged forms 
\nth veiling vapor, but to tell the tale which no pencilling 
could, the story of its utter absolute barrenness of unlichened, 
dead, desolate rock : — 

" The wildest glen, but this, can show 
Some touch of nature's genial glow, 
On high Benmore green mosses grow 
And heath-bells bud in deep Glencoe. 
And copse on Cruchan Ben ; 
But here, above, around, below, 
On mountain, or in glen, 
Nor tree, nor plant, nor shrub, nor flower, 
Nor ought of vegetative power, 
The wearied eye may ken ; 
But all its rocks at random thrown. 
Black waves, bare crags, and banks of stone.' 

Lord of the Isles, Canto III. 

•' Bo as a Presence or a motion — one 
Among the many there — while the mists 
Flying, and rainy vapors, caU out shapes 
And phantoms from the crags and solid earth. 
As fast as a musician scatters souMds 
Out of an instrument." — 



52 NATURE. 

Stand ui^on the peak of some isolated mountain at day 
break, when the night-mists first rise from oiFthe plains, and 
watch their white and lake-like fields as they float in level 
bays and wmding gulphs about the islanded summits of the 
lower hills, untouched yet by more than dawn, colder and 
more quiet than a wmdless sea under the moon of midnight. 
Watch when the first sunbeam is sent upon the silver chamiels, 
how the foam of their undulating surface parts and passes 
away ; and down under their depths the glittering city and 
green pasture lie like Atlantis, between the white paths of 
winding rivers ; the flakes of light falling every moment faster 
and broader among the starry spires, as the wreathed surges 
break and vanish above them, and the confused crests and 
ridges of the dark hills shorten their gray shadows upon the 
plain. Wait a Uttle longer, and you shall see those scattered 
mists rallying in the ravines and floatmg up towards you, 
along the winding valleys, till they couch 'in quiet masses, 
iridescent with the morning light, upon the broad breasts of 
the higher hills, whose leagues of massy undulation will melt 
back and back into that robe of material light, until they fade 
away, lost in its lustre, to ajipear agam above, in the serene 
heaven, like a wild, bright, impossible dream, foundationless 
and inaccessible, theu' very bases vanishing in the unsubstan- 
tial and mocking blue of the deep lake below. Wait yet a 
little longer, and you shall see those mists gather themselves 
into white towers, and stand like fortresses along the promon- 
tories, massy and motionless, only piling with CA^ery instant 
higher and higher into the sky, and casting longer shadows 
athwart the rocks ; and out of the pale blue of the horizon 
you will see forming and advancing a troop of narrow, dark, 
pointed vapors, which will cover the sky, inch by inch, with 
their gray network, and take the light oflf the landscape with 
an eclipse which will stop the singing of the birds and the 



THE CENTRAL CLOUD REGION. 53 

motion of the leaves togethei" ; and then you will see hoi'izon- 
tal bars of black shadow forming under them, and lurid 
wreaths create themselves, you know not how, along tlie 
shoulders of the hills ; you never see them form, but when 
you look back to a place which was clear an instant ago, there 
is a cloud on it, hanging by the precipices, as a hawk pauses 
over his prey. And then you will hear the sudden rush of 
the awakened wmd, and you will see those watch-towers of 
vapor swept away from their foundations, and waving curtains 
of opaque rain let down to the valleys, swinging from the bur- 
dened clouds in black, bending fringes, or pacing in pale columns 
along the lake level, grazing its surface into foam as they go. 
And then, as the sun sinks, you shall see the storm drift for an 
instant from off the hills, leaving their broad sides smoking, 
and loaded yet with snow-white, torn, steam-like rags of 
capricious vapor, now gone, now gathered again ; while the 
smouldering sun,' seeming not far aAvay, but burning like a 
red-hot ball beside you, and as if you could reach it, plunges 
through the rushing wind and rolUng cloud with headlong 
fall, as if it meant to rise no more, dyeing all the air about it 
with blood. And then you shall hear the fainting tempest die 
in the hollow of the night, and you shall see a green halo 
kindling on the summit of the eastern hills, brighter — bi'ighter 
yet, till the large white circle of the slow moon is lifted up 
among the barred clouds, step by step, hue by line ; star after 
star she quenches with her kindling light, setting in their stead 
an army of pale, penetrable, fleecy wreaths in the heaven, to 
give liglit upon the earth, which move together, hand in hand, 
company by company, troop by troop, so measured in their 
unity of motion, that the whole heaven seems to roll with 
them, and the earth to reel imder them. And then wait yet 
for one hour, until the east again becomes purple, and the 
]iea\'ing mountains, rolling against it in darkness, like waves 



54 NATURE. 

of a wild sea, are drowned one by one in the glory of its 
burning ; watcli the white glaciers blaze in their winding 
paths about the mountains, like mighty serpents, with scales 
of fire ; watch the columnar peaks of solitary snow, kindling 
downwards, chasm by chasm, each in itself a new morning ; 
their long avalanches cast down in keen streams brighter than 
the lightning, sending each his tribute of driven snow, Uke 
altar-smoke, up to the heaven ; the rose-light of their silent 
domes flushing that heaven about them and above them, 
piercing with purer light through its purple lines of lifted 
cloud, casting a new glory on every wreath as it passes by, 
until the whole heaven — one scarlet canojDy — is interwoven 
with a roof of waving flame, and tossing, vault beyond vault, 
as with the drifted wings of many companies of angels ; and 
then, when you can look no more for gladness, and wlicn you 
are bowed down with fear and love of the Maker and Doer 
of this, tell me who has best delivered this His message unto 
men! 



RAIN CLOUDS. 



The clouds which I wish to consider as characteristic of the 
loxoer^ or rainy region^ difier not so much in their real nature 
from those of the central and uppermost regions, as in appear- 
ance, owing to their greater nearness. For the central clouds, 
and perhaps even the high cirri, deposit moisture, if not dis- 
tinctly raiu, as is sufficiently proved by the existence of snow 
on the highest peaks of the Himaleh ; and when, on any such 
mountauis, we are brought into close contact with the central 
clouds, we find them little differing from the ordmary rain 



RAIN CLOUL»S. 55 

cloud of the plains, exceiat by being sliglitly less dense and 
dark. But the apparent differences, dependent on proximity, 
are most marked and important. 

In the first place, the clouds of the central region have, as 
has been before observed, pure and aerial grays for then- dark 
sides, owing to their necessary distance from the observer; 
and as this distance permits a multitude of local phenomena 
capable of influencing color, such as accidental sunbeams, 
refractions, transparencies, or local mists and showers, to be 
collected into a space apparently small, the colors of these 
clouds are always changeful and palpitating ; and whatever 
degree of gray or of gloom may be mixed with them is inva- 
riably pure and aerial. But the nearness of the rain-cloud 
rendering it impossible for a number of phenomena to be at 
once visible, makes its hue of gray monotonous, and (by losing 
the blue of distance) warm and brown compared to that of the 
upper clouds. This is especially remarkable on any part of it 
which may happen to be illumhied, which is of a brown, bricky, 
ochreous tone, never bright, always coming in dark outline on 
the lights of the central clouds. But if is seldom that this 
takes jilace, and when it does, never over large spaces, Uttle 
being usually seen of the ram-cloud but its under and dark 
side. This, when the cloud above is dense, becomes of an inky 
and cold gray, and sulphureous and lurid if there be thunder 
in the au*. 

To the region of the rain-cloud belong also all those phe- 
nomena of drifted smoke, heat-haze, local mists in the morning 
or evening ; in valleys, or over water, mirage, white steaming 
vapor rising in evaporation from moist and open surfaces, and 
every thing which visibly affects the condition of the atmo- 
sphere Avithout actually assuming the form of cloud. These 
phenomena are as perpetual in all countries as they are beau- 
tiful, and afford by far the most effective and valuable means 



66 NATUEE. 

which the painter possesses, for modification of the forms of 
fixed objects. The upper clouds are distinct and compara. 
tively opaque, they do not modify, but conceal ; but through 
the rain-cloud, and its accessory j^henomena, all that is beau- 
tiful may be made manifest, and all that is hurtful concealed ; 
what is paltry may be made to look vast, and what is pon- 
derous, aerial; mystery may be obtained Avithout obscurity, 
and decoration Avithout disguise. And, accordingly, nature 
herself uses it constantly, as one of her chief means of most 
perfect effect ; not in one country, nor another, but every- 
where — everywhere, at least, where there is anything worth 
calling landscape. I cannot answer for the desert of the 
Sahara, but I know that there can be no greater mistake, than 
supposing that delicate and variable effects of mist and rain- 
cloud are peculiar to northern climates. I have never seen in 
any place or country effects of mist more perfect than in the 
Campagna of Rome, and among the hills of Sorrento. We 
never can see the azure so intense as when the greater part of 
this vapor has just fallen in ram. Then, and then only, pure 
blue sky becomes visible in the first openings, distinguished 
especially by the manner in which the clouds melt into it ; 
their edges passing off in faint white threads and fringes, 
through which the blue shines more and more intensely, till 
the last trace of vapor is lost in its perfect color. It is only 
the upper white clouds, however, which do this, or the last 
fragments of rain-clouds, becoming white as they disappear, so 
that the blue is never coi^itpted by the cloud, but only paled 
and broken with pure white, the purest white which the sky 
ever shows. Thus we have a melting and palpitating color, 
never the same for two inches together, deepening and 
broadening here and there into intensity of pei-fect azure, then 
drifted and dying away through every tone of pure pale sky, 
into the snow white of the filmy cloud. Over this roll the 



KAIN CLOUDS. 67 

determined edges of the rain-clouds, throwing it all far back, 
as a retired scene, into the upper sk3\ 

Not long ago I was slowly descending the first turn after 
you leave Albano. It had been wild w^eather when I left 
Rome, and all across the Campagna the clouds were sweeping 
in sulphurous blue, with a clap of thunder or two, and break- 
ing gleams of sun along the Claudian aqueduct, lighting x\^ the 
infinity of its arches like the bridge of chaos. But as I climbed 
the long slope of the Alban mount, the storm swept finally to 
the north, and the noble outlines of the domes of Albano, and 
graceful darkness of its ilex groves, rose against pure streaks 
of alternate blue and amber ; the upper sky gradually flash- 
ing through the last fragments of rain-cloud in dee}) palpitat- 
ing azure, half ether and half dew. The noon-day sun came 
slanting down the rocky slopes of La Riccia, and its masses of 
entangled and tall foliage, whose autumnal tints were mixed 
with the Avet verdure of a thousand evergreens, were pene- 
trated with it as with rain. I cannot call it color, it was con- 
flagration ; purple, and crunson, and scarlet, like the curtains 
of God's tabernacle. The rejoicmg trees sank into the valley 
in showers of light, every separate leaf quivering with buoy- 
ant and burning life ; each, as it turned to reflect or to trans- 
mit the sunbeam, first a torch and then an emerald. Far up 
into the recesses of the valley, the green vistas, arched like the 
hollows of mighty waves of some crystalline sea, with the 
arbutus flowers clasped along their flanks for foam, and silver 
flakes of orange-flower-like spray tossed into the air, around 
til era, breaking over the grey "walls of rock, into a thousand 
separate stars, fading and kindling alternately as the weak 
wind lifted and let them fall. Every glade of grass burned 
like the golden floor of heaven, opening in sudden gleams as 
the foliage broke and closed above it, as sheet lightning opens 
in a cloud at simset. The motionless masses of dark rock-^ 



68 NATURE. 

dark, thougli flushed with scarlet lichen — casting their qiuet 
shadows across its restless radiance, the fountain underneath 
them filling its marble hollow with blue mist and fitful sound, 
and over all the multitudhious bars of umber and rose, the 
sacred clouds that have no darkness, and only exist to illu- 
mine, were seen in fathomless intervals between the solemn 
and orbed repose of the stone pines, passing to lose themsehes 
in the last white blinding lustre of the measureless line, where 
the Campagna melted into the blaze of tbe sea. 

The woods and waters which were peopled by the Greek 
with typical life were not different from those w^hich now 
wave and murmur by the ruins of his shrines. With their 
■visible and actual forms was his imagination filled, and the 
beauty of its hacarnate creatures can only be understood 
among the pure realities which originally modelled their con- 
ception. If divinity be stamped upon the features, or appa- 
rent in the form of the spiritual creature, the mind will not be 
shocked by its appearing to ride upon the whirlwind, and 
trample on the storm ; but if mortality, no \'iolation of the 
characters of earth will forge one single Imk to bind it to 
heaven. 

Though Nature is constantly beautiful, she does not exhibit 
her highest powers of beauty constantly, for then they would 
satiate us and pall upon the senses. It is necessary to theii* 
appreciation that they should be rarely thown. Her finest 
touches are things which must be watched for ; her most per- 
fect passages of beauty are the most evanescent. She is con- 
stantly doing something beautiful for us, but it is something 
which she has not done before and will not do again ; — some 
exhibition of her general powers in particular circumstances, 
which if we do not catch at the instant it is passing, will not 



\ 



KAIN CLOUDS. 59 

be reiJeatecl for us. Now, tliey are these evanescent passages 
of perfected beauty, these perpetually varied examples of 
utmost power, which the artist ought to seek for and arrest. 

Perhaps there is no more impressive scene on earth than 
the solitary extent of the Campagna of Rome, under evening 
light. Let the reader imagine himself, for a moment, with- 
dra^^^^ from the sounds and motions of the livmg world, and 
sent forth alone into this wild and wasted plain. The earth 
yields and crumbles beneath his foot, tread he never so Ughtly, 
for its substance is white, hollow, and carious, like the dusty <• 
wreck of the bones of men. The long, knotted grass waves 
and tosses feebly m the evening wind, and the shadows of its 
motion shake feverishly along the banks of ruin that hft them- 
W>(' selves to the sunhght. Hillocks of mouldermg earth heave 
aroimd him, as if the dead beneath were struggling in their 
sleep ; scattered blocks of black stone, four square, remnants 
of mighty edifices, not one left upon another, he upon them, 
to keep them dovra. A dull purple, poisonous haze stretches 
level along the desert, veiling its spectral wrecks of massy 
ruins, on whose rents the red light rests, Uke dying fire 
on defiled altars. The blue ridge of the Alban Mount, lifts 
itself against a solemn space of green, clear, quiet sky. 
Watchtowers of dark clouds stand steadfastly along the pro- 
montories of the Apennines. From the plain to the mountams, 
the shattered aqueducts, pier beyond pier, melt into the dark- 
ness, like shadowy and countless troops of funeral mournera 
passing from a nation's grave. 



NATURE. 



WATER. 



Of all inorganic substances, acting in their own proper 
nature, and without assistance or combination, water is the 
most wonderful. If we think of it as the source of all the 
changefulness and beauty which we have seen in clouds ; then 
as the instrument by which tlje earth we have contemplated 
was modelled into symmetry, and its crags chiselled into 
grace ; then as, in the form of snow, it robes the mountains it 
has made, with that transcendent light which we could not 
have conceived if we had not seen ; then as it exists in the 
foam of the torrent — in the iris which spans it, in the morning 
mist which rises from it, in the deep crystalline pools which 
mirror its hanging shore, in the broad lake and glancing 
river ; finally, in that which is to all human minds the best 
emblem of unwearied, unconquerable power, the wild, various, 
fantastic, tameless unity of the sea ; what shall we compare to 
this mighty, this universal element, for glory and for beauty? 
or how shall we follow its eternal changefulness of feeling ? It 
is like trying to paint a soul. 

Few people, comparatively, have ever seen the effect on the 
sea of a powerful gale contmued without intermission for three 
or four days and nights, and to those who have not I believe 
It must be unimaginable, not from the mere force or size of 
surge, but from the comj)lete annihilation of the limit between 
sea and air. The water from its prolonged agitation is beaten, 
not into mere creaming foam, but into masses of accumulated 
yeast,* which hangs in ropes and wreaths from wave to wave, 

* The " yesty waves " of Shakspeare have made the likeness familiar, and 
probably most readers take the expression as merely equivalent to " foamy ;" 
but Shakspeare knew better. Sea-foam does not, uude/ ordLiary circum- 
stances, last a moment after it is formed, but disappears, as above described, in 



WATER, Gl 

and where one curls over to break, form a festoon like a 
drapery, fi-om its edge ; these are taken up by the wind, not 
in dissipating dust, but bodily, in writhing, hanging, coiling 
masses, which make the air white and thick as with snow, 
only the flakes are a foot or two long each ; the surges them- 
selves are full of foam in their very bodies, underneath, making 
them white all through, as the water is under a great cata- 
ract ; and their masses, being thus half water and half air, are 
torn to pieces by the wind whenever they rise, and carried 
away in roai'ing smoke, which chokes and strangles like actual 
water. Add to tliis, that when the air has been exhausted of 
its moisture by long rain, the spray of the sea is caught by it 
and covers its surface not merely with the smoke of finely 
divided water, but with boiling mist ; imagine also the low 
rain-clouds brought down to the very level of the sea, as I 

a mere white film. But the foam of a prolonged tempest is altogether differ 
ent; it is "whipped" foam, — thick, permanent, and, in a foul or discolored 
sea, very ugly, especially in the way it hangs about the tops of the waves, and 
gathers into clotted concretions before the driviag wind. The sea looks truly 
working or fermenting. The follomng passage from Fennimore Cooper is an 
interesting confirmation of the rest of the above description, which may be 
depended upon as entirely free from exaggeration: — "For the first time I now 
witnessed a tempest at sea. Gales, and pretty hard ones, I had oitea seen, 
but the force of the wind on this occasion as much exceeded that in ordinary 
gales of wind, as the force of these had exceeded that of a whole-sail breeze. 
The seas seemed crushed ; the pressure of the swooping atmosphere, as the 
cun'ents of the air went howling over the surfoce of the ocean, fairly prevent- 
ing them from rising ; or where a mound of water did appear, it was scooped 
up and borne off in spray, as the axe dubs inequalities from the log. "When 
the day returned, a species of lurid, sombre ligl^t was diffused over the watery 
waste, though nothing was visible but the ocean and the ship. Even the sea- 
birds seemed to have taken refuge in the caverns of the adjacent coast, none 
reappearing with the dawn. The ah* was full of spray, and it was with diffi- 
culty that the eye could penetrate as far into the humid atmosphere as half a 
mile." Half a mile is an over-estimate in coast. 



62 NATURE. 

have often seen them, whirling and flying in rags and frag 
ments from wave to wave ; and finally, conceive the surges 
themselves in their utmost pitch of power, velocity, vastness, 
and madness, lifting themselves in precipices and peaks, fur- 
rowed with their whirl of ascent, through all this chaos, and 
you will understand that there is Indeed no distinction left 
between the sea and air ; that no object, nor horizon, nor any 
landmark or natural evidence of i>osition is left ; that the 
heaven is all spray, and the ocean all cloud, and that you can 
see no farther in any direction than you could see through a 
cataract. Few people have had the opportunity of seeing the 
sea at such a' time, and when they have, cannot face it. To 
hold by a mast or a rock, and watch it, is a prolonged endur- 
ance of drowning which few people have courage to go 
through. To those who have, it is one of the noblest lessons 
of nature, 

* All rivers, small or large, agree in one character ; they like 
to lean a little on one side ; they cannot bear to have their 
channels deepest in the middle, but will always, if they can, 
have one bank to smi themselves upon, and another to get 
cool under ; one shingly shore to play over, where they may 
be shallow, and foolish, and childlike ; and another steep shore, 
under which they can pause and purify themselves, and get 
then- strength of waves fully together for due occasions. 
Rivers in this way are just Uke wise men, who keep one side 
of their life for play, and another for work ; and can be bril- 
liant, and chattermg, and transparent when they are at ease, 
and yet take deep counsel on the other side when they set 
themselves to the main purpose. And rivers are just in this 
divided, also, like wicked and good men ; the good rivers have 
serviceable deep places all along their banks that ships can sail 
in, bvit the wicked rivers go scoopmgly, irregularly, under 
their banks until they get full of strangling eddies, which no 



WATER. 63 

boat can row over without being twisted against the rocks, 
and pools like wells which no one can get out of but the 
water-kelpie that lives at the bottom ; but, wicked or good, 
the rivers all agree in having two sides. 

Stand for half an hour beside the fall of Schaffhausen, on 
the north side where the rapids are long, and watch how the 
vault of water first bends, imbroken, in pure, polished velo- 
city, over the arching rocks at the brow of the cataract, 
covering them with a dome of crystal twenty feet thick — so 
swift that its motion is unseen except when a foam globe 
from above darts over it like a fallmg star ; and how the trees 
are lighted above it under their leaves, at the instant that it 
breaks into foam ; and how all the hoUows of that foam bum 
with green fire like so much shattering chrysoprase ; and how, 
ever and anon, startling you with its white flash, a jet of spray 
leaps hissing out of the fall like a rocket, bursting in the Avind 
and driven away in dust, filling the air with light ; and how, 
througli the curdling wreaths of the restless, crashing abyss 
below, the blue of the water, paled by the foam in its body, 
showers purer than the sky through white rain-cloud ; while 
the shuddering iris stoops in tremulous stillness over all, 
fading and flushing alternately through the choking spray 
and shattered sunshine, hiding itself at last among the thick 
golden leaves which toss to and fro in sympathy with the 
wild water; their dripping masses lifted at intervals, like 
sheaves of loaded corn, by some stronger gush from the 
cataract, and bowed again upon the mossy rocks as its roar 
dies away ; the dew gushing from their thick branches through 
drooping clusters of emerald herbage, and sparkling in white 
threads along the dark rocks of the shore, feeding the lichens 
Avhich chase and checker them with purple and silver. There 
is hardly a road-side pond or pool which has not as much 



64 NATURE. 

landscape in it as above it. It is not the brown, muddy, 
dull thing we su^jpose it to be ; it has a heart like ourselves, 
and in the bottom of that there are the boughs of the tall 
trees, and the blades of the shaking grass, and all manner of 
hues, of variable, pleasant light out of the sky ; nay, the ugly 
gutter, that stagnates over the drain bars, in the heart of the 
foul city, is not altogether base ; down in that, if you will 
look deep enough, you may see the dark, serious blue of far- 
off sky, and the passing of pure clouds. It is at your own i 
will that you see in that despised stream, either the refuse of 
the street, or the image of the sky — so it is with almost all 
other things that we unkindly despise. 

When water, not in very great body, runs in a rocky bed 
much interrupted by hollows, so that it can rest every now 
and then in a pool as it goes along, it does not acquire a con- 
tinuous velocity of motion. It pauses after every leap, and 
curdles about, and rests a little, and then goes on again ; and 
if in this comparatively tranquil and rational state of mind it 
meets with an obstacle, as a rock or stone, it parts on each 
side of it with a little bubbling foam, and goes round ; if it 
come to a step in its bed, it leaps it lightly, and then after a 
little plashing at the bottom, stops again to take breath. But 
if its bed be on a continuous slope, not much mterrupted by 
hollows, so that it cannot rest, or if its o^^m mass be so in- 
creased by flood that its usual resting-places are not sufficient 
for it, but that it is perpetually pushed out of them by the 
following current, before it has come to tranquillise itself, it 
of course gains velocity with every yard that it runs ; the im- 
petus got at one leap is carried to the credit of the next, until 
the whole stream becomes one mass of unchecked, accelerat- 
ing motion. Now when water in this state comes to an 
obstacle, it does not part at it, but clears it like a race-horse ; 
and when it comes to a hollow, it does not fill it up and run 



WATER. 65 

out leisurely at the other side, but it rushes down into it and 
comes up again on the other side, as a ship into the hollow 
of the sea. Hence the whole appeai'ance of the bed of the 
stream is changed, and all the lines of the water altered in 
their nature. The quiet stream is a succession of leaps and 
pools ; the leaps are light and springy, and parabolic, and make 
a great deal of splashing when they tumble into the pool, 
then we have a space of quiet curdling water, and another 
similar leap below. But the stream when it has gained an 
impetus takes the shape of its bed, never stops, is equally 
deep and equally swift everywhere, goes down into every 
hoUow, not with a leap, but with a swing, not foaming, nor 
splashing, but in the bending line of a strong sea-wave, and 
comes up again on the other side, over rock and ridge, with 
the ease of a bounding leopard ; if it meet a rock three or 
four feet above the level of its bed, it will neither part nor 
foam, nor express any concern about the matter, but clear it 
in a smooth dome of water, without apparent exertion, coming 
down again as smoothly on the other side ; the whole siirface 
of the surge being drawn into parallel lines by its extreme 
velocity, but foamless, except in places where the form of the 
bed opposes itself at some direct angle to such a line of fall, and 
causes a breaker ; so that the whole river has the appearance 
of a deep and raging sea, with this only difference, that the 
torrent-waves always break backwards, and sea-waves for- 
wards. Thus, then, in the water which has gained an impetus, 
we have the most exquisite arrangements of curved lines, per- 
l^etually changing from convex to concave, and vice versd, 
following every swell and hollow of the bed with their modu- 
lating grace, and all in unison of motion, presenting perhaps 
the most beautiful series of inorganic forms which nature can 
possibly produce ; for the sea runs too much into similar and 
concave curves with sharp edges, but every motion of tlio 



66 NATUKE. 

torrent is united, and all its curves are modifications of beau 
tiful line. 

Every fountain and river from the inch-deep streamlet that 
crosses the village lane in trembling clearness, to the massy 
and silent march of the everlasting multitude of waters in 
Amazon or Ganges, owe their play, and purity, and power, to 
the ordained elevations of the earth. Gentle or steep, ex- 
tended or abrupt, some determined slope of the earth's sur- 
face is of course necessary before any wave can so much as 
overtake one sedge in its pilgrimage ; and how seldom do we 
enough consider, as we walk beside the margins of our plea- 
sant brooks, how beautiful and wonderful is that ordinance, of 
which every blade of grass that waves in their clear water is 
a perpetual sign ; that the dew and rain fallen on the face of 
the earth shall find no resting-place ; shall find, on the contrary, 
fixed channels traced for them, from the ravines of the central 
crests down which they roar in sudden ranks of foam, to the 
dark hollows beneath the banks of lowland pasture, round 
which they must circle slowly among the stems and beneath 
the leaves of the lilies ; paths prepared for them, by which, at 
some appointed rate of journey, they must evermore descend, 
semetimes slow and sometimes swift, but never pausing ; the 
daily portion of the earth they have to glide over marked 
for them at each successive sunrise, the place which has known 
them knowing them no more, and the gateways of guarding 
mountains opened for them in cleft and chasm, none letting 
them in their pilgrimage ; and, from far off, the great heart 
of the sea calling them to itself! Deep calleth unto deep. I 
know not which of the two is the more wonderful — that calm, 
gradated, invisible slope of the champaign land, which givea 
motion to the stream ; or that passage cloven for it through 
the ranks of hill, which, necessary for the health of the land 



WATER. 67 

irnmediately around them, Avould yet, unless so supernaturally 
divided, have fatally intercepted the flow of the waters from 
far-off countries. When did the great spirit of the river 
first knock at those adamantine gates ? When did the porter 
open to it, and cast his keys away for ever, lapped in whirling 
sand ? I am not satisfied — no one should be satisfied — with 
that vague answer, — the river cut its way. Not so. The 
Yixov foimd its way. ' 

It was a maxim of Raffaelle's that the artist's object was to 
make things not as Nature makes them, but as she looulcl 
make them ; as she ever tries to make them, but never suc- 
ceeds, though her aim may be deduced from a comparison of 
her effects ; just as if a number of archers had aimed unsuc- 
cessfully at a mark upon a wall, and this mark were then 
removed, we could by the examination of their arrow- 
marks point out the probable position of the siDOt aimed at, 
with a certainty of being nearer to it than any of their shots. 

We have most of us heard of original sin, and may perhaps, 
in our modest moments, conjecture that we are not quite 
what God, or Nature, would have us to be. Raffaelle had 
something to mend in humanity: I should like to have seen 
him mending a daisy, or a pease-blossom, or a moth, or a mus- 
tard-seed, or any other of God's slightest works ! If he had 
accompHshed that, one might have found for him more respec- 
table employment, to set the stars in better order, perhaps 
(they seem grievously scattered as they are, and to be of all 
manner of shapes and sizes, except the ideal shape, and the 
proper size); or, to give us a corrected view of the ocean, that 
at least seems a very irregular and improveable thing : the 
very fishermen do not know this day how far it will reach, 
driven up before the west wmd. Perhaps some one else does, 
but that is not our business. Let us go do^na and stand on 



68 NATURE. 

the beach by the sea — the great kregular sea, and count 
whether the thunder of it is not out of time — one, — two: — • 
here comes a well-formed wave at last, trembling a little at 
tlie top, but on the whole, orderly. So ! Crash among the 
shingle, and up as far as this grey pebble ! Now, stand by and 
watch. Another: — Ah, careless wave! why couldn't you have 
kept your crest on ? It is all gone away into spray, striking 
up against the cliffs there — I thought as much — missed the 
mark by a couple of feet! Another: — How now, impatient 
one ! couldn't you have waited till your friend's reflux was 
done with, instead of rolling yourself wp with it in that 
unseemly manner? You go for nothing. A fourth, and a 
goodly one at last ! What think we of yonder slow rise, and 
crystalline hollow, without a flaw ? Steady, good wave ! not so 
fast ! not so fast ! Where are you coming to ? This is too bad ; 
two yards over the mark, and ever so much of you in our face 
besides; and a wave which we had some hope of, behind 
there, broken all to pieces out at sea, and laying a great white 
tablecloth of foam all the way to the shore, as if the marine 
gods were to dine off it ! Alas, for these unhappy " arrow 
shots" of Nature ! She will never hit her mark with those 
imruly waves of hers, nor get one of them into the ideal 
shape, if we wait for a thousand years. 



MOUNTAIN'S. 



" And God said, Let the waters which are under the heaven 
be gathered unto one place, and let the dry land appear." 
We do not, perhaps, often enough consider the deep signi 
ficance of this sentence. We are too apt to receive it as the 
description of an event vaster 'inly in its extent, not in its 



MOUNTAINS. 69 

nature, than the compelling the Red Sea to draw hack that 
Israel might pass by. We imagine the Deity in like manner 
rolling the waves of the greater ocean together on a heap, 
and setting bars and doors to them eternally. 

But there is a far deeper meaning than this in the solemn 
words of Genesis, and in the correspondent verse of the 
Psalm, "His hands prepared the dry land." Up to that 
moment the earth had been void, for it had been loithoictform. 
The command that the waters should be gathered w\as the 
command that the earth should be sculptured. The sea was 
not driven to his place in sudden restrained rebellion, but 
Anthdrawn to his place in perfect and patient obedience. The 
dry land appeared, not in level sands forsaken by the surges, 
which those surges might again claim for their own ; but in 
range beyond range of swelling hill and iron rock, for ever to 
claim kindred with the firmament, and be comjianioned by the 
clouds of heaven. 

What space of time was in reality occupied by the " day " 
of Genesis, is not, at present, of any importance for us to 
consider. By what furnaces of fire the adamant was melted, 
and by what wheels of earthquake it was torn, and by what 
teeth of glacier and weight of sea-waves it was engraven and 
finished into its perfect form, we may, perhaps, hereafter en- 
deavor to conjecture ; but here, as in few words the work is 
summed up by the historian, so in few broad thoughts it 
should be comprehended by us ; and as we read the mighty 
sentence, " Let the dry land appear," we should try to follow 
the finger of God, as it engraved upon the stone tables of the 
earth the letters and the law of its everlasting form ; as gulf 
by gulf the channels of the deep were ploughed, and cape 
by cape the lines were traced, wath Divine foreknowledge of 
the shores that were to limit the nations ; and chain by chain 
the mountain walls were lengthened foi'th, and their foun 



VO NATURE. 

dations fastened for ever ; and the compass was set upon the 
face of the deep, and the fields and the highest parts of the 
dust of the world were made ; and the right hand of Christ 
first strewed the snow on the Lebanon, and smoothed the 
slopes of Calvary. 

It is not always needful, in many respects it is not possible, 
to conjecture the manner or the time in which this work was 
done ; but it is deeply necessary for all men to consider the 
magnificence of the accomplished purpose, and the depth of 
the wisdom and love which are manifested in the ordinances 
of the hills. 

For, observe, in order to bring the world into the form 
which it now bears, it was not mere sculj^ture that was needed; 
the moimtains could not stand for a day unless they were 
formed of materials altogether different from those which 
constitute the lower hills and the surfaces of the valleys. A 
harder substance had to be prepared for every mountain chain, 
yet not so hard but that it might be capable of crumbling 
down into earth tit to nourish the Alpine forest and the Alpine 
flower; not so hard but that, in the midst of the utmost 
majesty of its enthroned strength, there should be seen on it 
the seal of death, and the writing of the same sentence that 
had gone forth against the human frame, " Dust thou art, and 
unto dust thou shalt return." And with this perishable sub- 
stance the most majestic forms were to be framed that were 
consistent with the safety of man ; and the peak was to be 
lifted, and the cliff rent, as high and as steeply as possible, in 
order yet to permit the shepherd to feed his flocks uj)on the 
slope, and the cottage to nestle beneath their shadow. 

And observe, two distmct ends were to be accomplished in 
the doing this. It was, indeed, absolutely necessary that such 
eminences should be created, in order to fit the earth in any 
wise for human habitation ; for without mountains the air 



MOUNTAINS. 71 

could not be pui-ified, nor the flowing of the rivers sustained, 
and the earth must have become for the most part desert 
plain, or stagnant marsh. But the feeding of the rivers and 
the purifying of the winds are the least of the services 
appointed to the hills. To fill the thirst of the human heart 
for the beauty of God's working, — to startle its lethargy with 
the deep and pure agitation of astonishment, — are their higher 
missions. They are as a great and noble architecture ; first 
giving shelter, comfort, and rest ; and covered also with 
mighty sculpture and painted legend. It is impossible to 
examine in their connected system the features of even the 
most ordinary mountain scenery, without concluding that it 
has been prepared in order to imite as far as possible, and in 
the closest compass, every means of delighting and sanctifying 
the heart of man. " As far as possible ; " that is, as far as is 
consistent vnth the fulfilment of the sentence of condemnation 
on the whole earth. Death must be upon the hUls ; and the 
cruelty of the tempest smite them, and the briar and thorn 
spring up upon them ; but they so smite, as to bring their 
rocks into the fairest forms ; and so spring, as to make the very 
desert blossom as the rose. Even among our own hills of 
Scotland and Cumberland, though often too barren to be jier- 
fectly beautiful, and always too low to be perfectly sublime, it 
is strange how many deep sources of delight are gathered into 
the compass of their glens and vales ; and how, down to the 
most secret cluster of their far-away flowers, and the idlest 
leap of their strajang streamlets, the whole heart of Xature 
seems thii-sting to give, and still to give, shedding forth her 
everlasting beneficence A\'ith a profusion so patient, so passion- 
ate, that our utmost observance and thankfulness are but, at 
least, neglect of her nobleness, and apathy to her love. But 
among the true mountains of the greater orders the Divine 
purpose of appeal at once to all the faculties of the hiwnan 



72 NATURE. 

spirit becomes still more manifest. Inferior hills ordinarily 
interrupt, in some degree, the richness of the valleys at their 
feet ; the grey downs of southern England, and treeless coteaux 
of central France, and grey swells of Scottish moor, whatever 
jDeculiar charm they may possess in themselves, are at least 
destitute of those which belong to the woods and fields of the 
lowlands. But the great mountains lift the lowlands 07i their 
sides. Let the reader imagine, first, the appearance of the 
most varied plain of some richly cultivated country ; let him 
imagine it dark with graceful woods, and soft with deepest 
pastures ; let him fill the space of it, to the utmost horizon, 
wdth innumerable and changeful incidents of scenery and life ; 
leading pleasant streamlets through its meadows, strewing 
clusters of cottages beside their banks, tracing sweet footpaths 
through its avenues, and animating its fields with happy flocks, 
and slow wandermg spots of cattle ; and when he has Avearied 
himself with endless imagining, and left no sjoace without some 
loveliness of its own, let him conceive all this great plain, with 
its infinite treasures of natural beauty and happy human life, 
gathered up in God's hand from one end of the horizon to the 
other, like a woven garment ; and shaken into deep falling 
folds, as the robes droop from a king's shoulders ; all its bright 
rivers leaping into cataracts along the hollows of its fall, and 
all its forests rearing themselves aslant against its slopes, as a 
rider rears himself back when his horse plunges ; and all its 
villages nestling themselves into the new windings of its 
glens ; and all its pastures thrown into steep waves of green- 
sward, dashed with dew along the edges of their folds, and 
sweeping down into endless slopes, with a cloud here and there 
lying quietly, half on the grass, half in the air ; and he will 
have as yet, in all this lifted world, only the foundation of one 
of the great Alps. 

They seem to have been built for the human race, as at 



MOUNTAINS. 73 

once their schools and cathedrals ; full of treasures of illumi- 
nated manuscript for the scholar, kindly in simple lessons to 
the worker, quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker, glorious in 
holiness for the Avorshipper. And of these great cathedrals 
of the earth, with their gates of rock, pavements of cloud, 
choii's of sti'eam and stone, altars of snow, and vaults of purple 
traversed by the continual stars, — of these, as we have seen, 
it was written, nor long ago, by one of the best of the poor 
human race for whom it was built, wondering in himself for 
whom their Creator could have made them, and thinking to 
have entirely discerned the Divine intent in them — " They are 
inhabited by the Beasts." 

Mountains are, to the rest of the body of the earth, what 
violent muscular action is to the body of man. The muscles 
and tendons of its anatomy are, in the mountain, brought out 
with fierce and convulsive energy, fuU of expression, passion, 
and strength ; the plains and the lower hills are the repose 
and the effortless motion of the frame, when its muscles lie 
dormant and concealed beneath the lines of its beauty, yet 
ruling those lines in their every undulation. This, then, is 
the first grand principle of the truth of the earth. The spirit 
of the hills is action ; that of the lowlands, repose ; and 
between these there is to be found every variety of motion 
and of rest ; from the inactive plain, sleeping like the firma- 
ment, with cities for stars, to the fiery peaks, which, with 
heaving bosoms and exulting limbs, with the clouds drifting 
like hair from their bright foreheads, lift up their Titan hands 
to Heaven, saying, "I live forever!" 

But there is this difierence between the action of the earth, 
and that of a living creature, that while the exerted limb 
marks its bones and tendons through the flesh, the excited 
earth casts ofi" the flesh altogether, and its bones come out 
from beneath. Mountains are the bones of the earth, their 

4 



74 NATURE. 

highest peaks are invariably those parts of its anatomy whic h 
in the plains lie buried under live and twenty thousand feet 
of solid thickness of supeiincumbent soil, and which spring up 
in the mountain ranges in A^ast pyramids or wedges, flinging 
their garment of earth away from them on each side. The 
masses of the lower hills are laid over and against their sides, 
like the masses of lateral masonry against the skeleton arch 
of an ixnfinished bridge, except that they slope up to and lean 
against the central ridge: and, finally, upon the slopes of 
these lower hills are strewed the level beds of sprinkled 
gravel, sand, and clay, which form the extent of the cham- 
paign. Here then is another grand principle of the truth tf 
earth, that the moimtains must come from under all, and be 
the support of all ; and that everything else must be laid in 
their arms, heap above heap, the plains being the uppermost. 

Snow is modified by the under forms of the hill in some 
sort, as dress is by the anatomy of the human frame. And as 
no dress can be well laid on Avithout conceiving the body 
beneath, so no Alp can be draAvn unless its mider form is 
<;onceived first, and its snow laid on afterwards. 

Every high Alp has as much snow upon it as it can hold or 
carry. It is not, observe, a mere coating of snow of given 
depth throughout, but it is snow loaded on until the rocks 
can hold no more. The surplus does not fall in the winter, 
because, fastened by continual frost, the quantity of snow which 
an Alp can carry is greater than each single Avinter can bestow ; 
it falls in the first mild days of spring in enormous avalanches. 
Afterwards the melting continues, gradually removing from 
all the steep rocks the small quantity of snow Avhich was all 
they could hold, and leaving them black and bare among the 
accumulated fields of unknoAvn depth, Avhich occupy the capa- 
cious valleys and less inclined superficies of the mountain. 

Hence it follows that the deepest snoAV d oes not take nor 



MOUNTAINS. V5 

indicate the actxial forms of the rocks on which it lies, but it 
hangs from peak to peak in unbroken and sweeping festoons, 
or covers whole groups of peaks, which aiFord it sufficient 
hold, with vast and unbroken domes : these festoons and domes 
being guided in their curves, and modified in size, by the 
violence and prevalent direction of the winter winds. 

It fell within the purpose of the Great BuUder to give, in 
the highest peaks of mountains, examples of form more strange 
and majestic than any which could be obtamed by structures 
so beneficently adapted to the welfare of the human race. 
And the admission of other modes of elevation, more terrific 
and less secure, takes place exactly in proportion to the 
increasing presence of such conditions in the locality as shall 
render it en other grounds unlikely to be inhabited or inca- 
pable of being so. Where the soil is rich and the climate soft, 
the hills are low and safe ; as the ground becomes poorer and 
the air keener, they rise into forms of more peril and pride ; 
and their utmost terror is shown only where their fragments 
fall on trackless ice, and the thunder of their ruin can be 
heard but by the ibex and the eagle. The work of the Great 
Spirit of nature is as deep and unapproachable in the lowest 
as in the noblest objects, the Divine mind is as visible iu its 
full energy of operation on every lowly bank and mouldering 
stone, as in the lifting of the pillars of heaven, and settling the 
foundation of the earth ; and to the rightly perceiving mind, 
there is the same infinity, the saine majesty, the same i30wer, 
the same unity, and the same perfection, manifest in the cast- 
ing of the clay as in the scattermg of the cloud, in the moul- 
dering of the dust as in the kindling of the day-star. 

It would be as absurd to think it an evil that all the world 
is not fit for us to inhabit, as to think it an evil that the globe 
is no larger than it is. As much as we shall ever need is 
evidently assigned to us for our dwelling-place; the rest, 



V6 NATURE. 

covered with rolling waves or drifting sands, fretted with ice 
or crested with fire, is set before las for contemplation in an 
uninhabitable magnificence ; and that part which we are ena- 
bled to inhabit ow^es its fitness for human life chiefly to its 
mountain ranges, which, throwing the superfluous rain off as it 
falls, collect it in streams or lakes, and guide it into given places. 

In some sense, a person who has never seen the rose-color 
of the rays of dawn crossing a blue mountain twelve or fifteen 
miles away, can hardly be said to know what tenderness in 
color means at all ; bright tenderness he may, indeed, see in 
the sky or in a flower, but this grave tenderness of the far- 
away hill-purples he cannot conceive. 

Together with this great source of pre-eminence in mass of 
color, we have to estimate the influence of the finished inlay- 
ing and enamel-work of the color-jewellery on every stone ; 
and that of the continual variety in sj)ecies of flower ; most of 
the mountain flowers bemg, besides, sej)arately lovelier than 
the lowland ones. The wood hyacinth and wild rose are, 
indeed, the only supreme flowers that the lowlands can gene- 
rally show ; and the wild rose is also a mountaineer, and more 
fragrant in the hills, whUe the wood hyacinth, or grape 
hyacinth, at its best cannot match even the dark bell-gentian, 
leaving the light-blue star-gentian in its uncontested queenli- 
ness, and the Alpine rose and Highland heather wholly with- 
out sunilitude. The violet, lily of the valley, crocus, and 
wood anemone are, I suppose, claimable partly by the plams 
as well as the hills ; but the large orange lily and narcissus I 
have never seen but on hill pastures, and the exquisite oxahs 
is pre-eminently a mountaineer.* 

* The Savoyard's name for its flower, 'Tain du Bon Dieu," is very beau- 
tiful ; from, I believe, the supposed resemblance of its white and scattered 
blossom to the fallen mannn. 



MOUNTAINS. 77 

There are three great offices Avhich mountain ranges are 
api^ointed to fulfil, in order to preserve the health and increase 
the happiness of mankind. 

1. The mountains and lulls givb. motion to water, so that 
men can build their cities in the midst of fields which will 
always be fertile, and establish the Imes of their commerce on 
streams which will not fail. 

2. Mountains maintain a constant change in the currents of 
the air. Mountains divide the earth not only uito districts, 
but into climates, and cause perpetual currents of air to tra- 
verse their passes, and ascend or descend their ravines, alter- 
ing both the temperature and nature of the air in a thousand 
difierent ways, moistening it with the spray of their water- 
falls, sucking it down and beating it hither and thither in the 
pools of their torrents, closing it within clefts and caves, 
where the sunbeams never reach, till it is as cold as Novem- 
ber mists, then sending it forth again to breathe softly across 
the slopes of velvet fields, or to be scorched among sunburnt 
shales and shapeless crags, then drawing it back in moaning 
swirls through clefts of ice, and up into dewy wreaths above 
the snow-fields ; then piercing it with strange electric darts 
and flashes of mountain fire, and tossing it high in fantastic 
storm-cloud as the dried grass is tossed by the mower, only 
sufiering it to depart at last, when chastened and pure, to 
refresh the faded air of the far-ofi" plains. 

3. The third great use of mountains is to cause perpetual 
change in the soils of the earth. Without such provisions 
the ground under cultivation would in a series of years become 
exhausted and require to be upturned laboriously by the 
hand of man. But the elevations of the earth's surface pro- 
vide for it a perpetual renovation. The higher mountains suf- 
fer their summits to be broken into fragments and to be cast 
down in sheets of massy rock, full, as we shall see presently, • 



V8 NATURE. 

of every substance necessary for the nourishment of plants 
these fallen fragments are again broken by frost, and ground 
by torrents, into various conditions of sand and clay — mate- 
rials which are distributed perpetually by the streams farther 
and farther from the mountain's base. Every shower which 
swells the rivulets enables their waters to carry certain portions 
of earth into new positions, and exposes new banks of ground 
to be mined in their turn. That turbid foaming of the angry 
water, — that tearing down of bank and rock along the flanks of 
its fury, — are no disturbances of the kind course of nature; they 
are beneficent operations of laws necessary to the existence of 
man and to the beauty of the earth. The process is contmued 
more gently, but not less effectively, over all the surface of 
the lower undulating country ; and each filtering thread of 
summer rain which trickles through the short turf of the up- 
lands is bearing its own appointed burden of earth to be thrown 
down on some new natural garden in the dingles below. 

And it is not, in reahty, a degrading, but a true, large, and 
ennobling view of the mountain ranges of the world, if we 
compare them to heaps of fertile and fresh earth, laid up by a 
prudent gardener beside his garden beds, whence, at inter- 
vals, he casts on them some scattering of new and virgin 
ground. That which we so often lament as convulsion or 
destruction is nothing else than the momentary shaking oflfthe 
dust from the spade. The winter floods, which inflict a tem- 
porary devastation, bear with them the elements of succeed- 
ing fertility; the fruitful field is covered with sand and shingle 
in momentary judgment, but in enduring mercy; and the 
great river, which chokes its mouth Avith marsh, and tosses ter 
ror along its shore, is but scattering the seeds of the harvests 
of futurity, and preparing the scats of unborn generations. 

I have not spoken of the local and peculiar utilities of 
mountains : I do not count the benefit of the supply of sxmi- 



MOUNTAINS. 'Id 

raer streams from the moors of the higher ranges — of the 
various medicinal plants wliich are nested among their rocks, 
— of the delicate pasturage which they furnish for cattle,* — 
of the forests in which they bear timber for shipping — the 
stones they supply for building, or the ores of metal which 
they collect into spots open to discovery, and easy for work- 
ing. All these benefits are of a secondary or a limited nature. 
But the three great functions which I have just described, — ■ 
those of giving motion and change to water, air, and earth, — ■ 
are indispensable to human existence ; they are operations to 
be regarded with as fall a depth of gratitude as the laws 
wliich bid the tree bear fruit, or the seed multiply itself in the 
earth. And thus those desolate and threatening ranges of 
dark mountain, which, in nearly all ages of the world, men 
have looked upon with aversion or with terror, and shrunk 
back from as if they were haunted by pei'petual images of 
death, are, in reality, sources of life and hapj^iness far fuller 
and more beneficent than all the bright fruitfulness of the 
plain. The valleys only feed ; the mountains feed, and guard, 
and strengthen us. We take our idea of fearfulness and subli- 
mity alternately from the mountains and the sea; but we 
associate them unjustly. The sea wave, with all its benefi- 
cence, is yet devouring and terrible, but the silent wave of the 
blue mountain is lifted towards heaven in a stillness of per- 
petual mercy ; and the one surge, unfathomable m its dai'k- 
ness, the other, unshaken in its faithfulness, for ever bear the 
seal of their appomted symbol : 

" Thy righteousness is like the great mountains : 
Thj judgments are a great deep." 

The higher mountains have their scenes of power and vast- 
ness, their blue precipices and cloud-like snows ; why should 

* The highest pasturages (at least so say the Savoyards) being always the 
best and richest. 



80 NATUEE. 

tliey also have the best and fairest colors given to their fore» 
ground rocks, and overburden the human mind with wonder ; 
while the less majestic scenery, tempting us to the observance 
of details for which amidst the higher mountains we have no 
admiration left, is yet, in the beauty of those very details, as 
mferior as it is in scale of magnitude ? 

I believe the answer must be, simply, that it is not good 
for man to live among what is most beautiful ; — that he is 
a creature incapable of satisfaction by anything upon earth ; 
and that to allow him habitually to possess, in any kind 
whatsoever, the utmost that earth can give, is the surest way 
to cast him into lassitude or discontent. 

If the most exquisite orchestral music could be continued 
without a pause for a series of years, and children were 
brought up and educated in the room in which it were perpe- 
tually resounding, I believe their enjoyment of music, or under- 
standing it, would be very small. And an accurately ijarallel 
effect seems to be produced upon the powers of contempla- 
tion, by the redundant and ceaseless loveliness of the high 
mountain districts. The faculties are paralysed by the abun- 
dance, and cease, as we befoi'e noticed of the imagination, to 
be capable of excitement, except by other subjects of interest 
than those which present themselves to the eye. So that it 
is, in reality, better for mankind that the forms of their com- 
mon landscape should offer no violent stimulus to the emotions, 
— that the gentle upland, browned by the bending furrows of 
the plough, and the fresh sweep of the chalk down, and the 
narrow winding of the copse-clad dingle, should be more fre- 
quent scenes of human life than the Arcadias of cloud-capped 
mountain or luxuriant vale ; and that, while humbler (though 
always infinite) sources of interest are given to each of us 
around the homes to which we are restrained for the greater 
part of our lives, these mightier and stranger glories should 



MOUNTAINS. 81 

become tlie objects of adventure, — at, once the cynosures of 
the fancies of childhood, and themes of the happy memory, 
and the winter's tale of age. 

Nor is it always that the inferiority is felt. For, so natural 
is it to the human heart to fix itself in hope rather than in 
present possession, and so subtle is the charm which the ima- 
gination casts over what is distant or denied, that there is 
often a more touching power in the scenes which contain far- 
away jDromise of something greater than themselves, than 
in those which exhaust the treasures and powers of Nature 
in an unconquerable and excellent glory, leavmg nothing 
more to be by the fancy pictured or pursued. 

I do not know that there is a district in the world more 
calculated to illustrate this power of the expectant imagination, 
than that which surrounds the city of Fribourg in Switzer- 
land, extending from it towards Berne. It is of grey sand- 
stone, considerably elevated, but presenting no object of 
striking interest to the passing traveller ; so that, as it is 
generally seen in the course of a hasty journey from the 
Bernese Alps to those of Savoy, it is rarely regarded with 
any other sensation than that of weariness, all the more pain- 
ful because accompanied with reaction from the high excite- 
ment caused by the splendor of the Bernese Oberland. The 
traveller, footsore, feverish, and satiated with glacier and pre- 
cipice, lies back in the corner of the diligence, perceiving little 
more than that the road is winding and hilly, and the country 
hrough which it passes cultivated and tame. Let him, how- 
ever, only do this tame country the justice of staying in it a 
few days, until his mind has recovered its tone, and taken one 
or two long walks through its fields, and he will have other 
thoughts of it. It is, as I said, an undulating district of grey 
sandstone, never attainmg any considerable height, but having 
enough of the mountain spirit to throw itself mto continual 

4* 



82 KATUEB. 

succession of bold slope and dale ; elevated, also, just fai 
enough above ilie sea to render the pine a frequent forest tree 
along its irregular ridges. Through this elevated tract the 
river cuts its way in a ravine some five or six hundred feet in 
depth, which winds for leagues between the gentle hills, un- 
thought of, until its edge is approached ; and then suddenly, 
through the boughs of the firs, the eye perceives, beneath, the 
gi-een and gliding stream, and the broad walls of sandstone 
cUfF that form its banks, hollowed out where the river leans 
against them, at its tui-ns, into perilous overhanging, and, on 
the other shore, at the same spots, leavmg little breadths of 
meadow between them and the water, half-overgrown with 
thicket, deserted in their sweetness, inaccessible from above, 
and rarely visited by any curious wanderers along the hardly 
traceable footpath which struggles for existence beneath the 
rocks. And there the river ripples, and eddies, and murmui'S 
in an utter solitude. It is passing through the midst of a 
thickly peopled country ; but never was a stream so lonely. 
The feeblest and most far-away torrent among the high hills 
has its companions : the goats browse beside it ; and the tra 
veller drinks from it, and passes over it with his staff; and 
the peasant traces a new channel for it down to his mill-wheel. 
But this stream has no companions : it flows on in an infinite 
seclusion, not secret or threatening, but a quietness of sweet 
daylight and oj^en air, — a broad space of tender and deep 
desolateness, drooped into repose out of the midst of human 
labor and life ; the waves plashing lowly, with none to hear 
them ; and the wild birds building in the boughs, with none 
to fray them away ; and the soft fragrant herbs rising, and 
breathing, and fading, with no hand to gather them ; — and 
yet all bright and bare to the clouds above, and to the fresh 
fall of the passing sunshine and pure rain. 

But above the brows of those scarped clifis, aU is in an 



MOUNTAINS. 88 

mstant changed. A few steps only beyond the firs t'nat 
stretch their branches, angular, and wild, and white, like forks 
of lightning, into the air of the ravine, and we are in an arable 
country of the most jjerfect richness ; the swathes of its corn 
glowing and burning from field to field ; its pretty hamlets all 
vivid with fruitful orchards and flowery gardens, and goodly 
with steep-roofed storehouse and barn; its well-kept, hard, 
park-like roads rising and falling from hillside to hillside, or 
disappearing among brown banks of moss, and thickets of 
the wild raspberry and rose ; or gleaming through lines of 
tall trees, half glade, half avenue, where the gate opens, or 
the gateless path turns trustedly aside, unhindered, into the 
garden of some statelier house, surrounded in rural pride with 
its golden hives, and carved granaries, and irregular domain 
of latticed and espaliered cottages, gladdening to look upon 
in their homeliness — delicate, yet, in some sort, rude; not 
like our English homes — trim, laborious, formal, irreproach- 
able in comfort ; but with a peculiar carelessness and large- 
ness in all their detail, harmonizing with the outlawed loveli- 
ness of their country. For there is an untamed strength 
even in all that soft and habitable land. It is, indeed, gilded 
with corn and fragrant with deep grass, but it is not subdued 
to the plough or to the scythe. It gives at its own free will, 
— it seems to have nothing wrested from it nor conquered in 
it. It is not redeemed from desertness, but unrestrained in 
fruitfulness, — a generous land, bright with capricious plenty, 
and laughmg from vale to vale in fitful fulness, kmd and wild ; 
nor this without some sterner element mingled in the heart of it. 
For along all its ridges stand the dark masses of innumerable 
pines, taking no part in its gladness, asserting themselves for- 
ever as fixed shadows, not to be pierced or banished, even in 
the intensest sunlight ; fallen flakes and fragments of the night, 
stayed in their solemn squares in the midst of aU the rosy 



84 NATURE. 

bendings of the orchard boughs, and the yellow effulgence of 
the harvest, and tracmg themselves in black network and 
motionless fringes against the blanched blue of the horizon in 
its saintly clearness. And yet they do not sadden the land- 
scape, but seem to have been set there chiefly to show how 
bright everything else is round them ; and all the clouds look 
of purer silver, and all the air seems filled with a whiter and 
more living sunshine, where they are pierced by the sable 
points of the pines ; and all the pastures look of more glowing 
green, where they run up between the purple trunks ; and the 
sweet field footpaths skirt the edges of the forest for the sake 
of its shade, sloping up and down about the slippery roots, 
and losing themselves every now and then hopelessly among 
the violets, and ground ivy, and brown sheddings of the 
fibrous leaves ; and, at last, plunging mto some open aisle 
where the light through the distant stems shows that there is 
a chance of coming out again on the other side ; and coming 
out, indeed, in a little while from the scented darkness, into 
the dazzling air and marvellous landscape, that stretches still 
farther and farther in new wilfulnesses of grove and garden, 
until, at last, the craggy mountains of the Simmenthal rise 
out of it, sharp into the rolling of the southern clouds. 

Close beside the path by which travellers ascend the Mon- 
tanvert from the valley of Chamouni, on the right hand, where 
it first begins to rise among the pines, there descends a small 
stream from the foot of the granite peak known to the guides 
as the Aiguille Charmoz. It is concealed from the traveller 
by a thicket of alder, and its murmur is hardly heard, for it is 
one of the weakest streams of the valley. But it is a constant 
stream ; fed by a permanent though small glacier, and con- 
tinumg to flow even to the close of the summer, when more 
copious torrents, depending on the melting of the lower 
snows, have left their beds " stony channels in the sun." 



MOUNTAINS. 85 

I suppose that my readers must be generally aware that 
glaciers are masses of ice in slow motion, at the rate of from 
Ten to twenty inches a day, and that the stones which are 
caught between them and the rocks over which they pass, or 
which are embedded in the ice and dragged along by it over 
those rocks, are of course subjected to a crushing and grind- 
ing power altogether unparalleled by any other force in 
constant action. The dust to which these stones are reduced 
by the friction is carried down by the streams which flow 
from the melting glacier, so that the water which in the morn- 
ing may be pure, owing what little strength it has chiefly to 
the rock springs, is in the afternoon not only increased in 
volume, but whitened with dissolved dust of granite, in j^ro- 
portion to the heat of the preceding hours of the day, and to 
the power and size of the glacier which feeds it. 

The long drought which took j^lace in the autumn of the 
year 1854, scaling every source of Avaters except these per- 
petual ones, left the torrent of which I am speaking, and such 
others, in a state peculiarly favorable to observance of their 
least action on the mountains from which they descend. They 
were entirely limited to their own ice fountains, and the 
quantity of powdered rock which they brought down was, of 
course, at its minimum, being nearly unmingled with any 
earth derived from the dissolution of softer soil, or vegetable 
mould, by rains. 

At three in the afternoon, on a warm day hi September, 
when the torrent had reached its average maximum strength 
for the day, I filled an ordinary Bordeaux wine-flask with the 
water Avhere it was least turbid. From this quart of water I 
obtained twenty-four grains of sand and sediment, more or 
less fine. I cannot estimate the quantity of water in the 
stream ; but the runlet of it at which I filled the flask was 
giving about two hundred bottles a minute, or rather more, 



86 NATUKE. 

carrying down therefore about three quarters of a pound of 
powdered granite every minute. This would be forty-five 
pounds an hour ; but allowing for the inferior power of the 
stream in the cooler periods of the day, and taking into con- 
sideration, on the other side, its increased power in rain, we 
may, I think, estimate its average hour's work at twenty- 
eight or thirty pounds, or a hundred-weight every four hours. 
By this insignificant runlet, therefore, some four inches wide 
and four inches deej), rather more than two tons of the sub- 
stance of Mont Blanc are displaced, and carried down a cer- 
tain distance every week ; and as it is only for three or four 
months that the flow of the stream is checked by frost, we 
may certainly allow eighty tons for the mass which it annually 
moves. 

It is not worth while to enter into any calculation of the 
relation borne by this runlet to the great torrents which 
descend from the chain of Mont Blanc into the valley of Cha- 
mouni. To call it the thousandth part of the glacier waters, 
would give a ludicrous under-estimate of their total power ; 
but even so callmg it, we should find for result that eighty 
thousand tons of mountain must be yearly transformed into 
drifted sand, and carried down a certain distance.* How 
much greater than this is the actual quantity so transformed 
I cannot tell ; but take this quantity as certain, and consider 
that this represents merely the results of the labor of the con- 
stant summer streams, utterly irrespective of all sudden falls 
of stones and of masses of mountain (a single thunderbolt will 
sometimes leave a scar on the flank of a soft rock, looking like 
a trench for a railroad) ; and we shall then begin to appre- 

* How far, is another question. The sand which the stream brings from 
the bottom of one eddj in its course, it throws down in the next ; all that is 
proved by the above trial is, that so many tons of material are annually car- 
ried down by it a certain number of feet. 



MOUNTAINS. 87 

hend something of the operation of the great laws of change, 
which are the conditions of all material existence, however 
apparently enduruig. The hills, which, as compared with 
living beings, seem " evei'lasting," are, in truth, as perishing 
as they: its veins of flowing fountain weary the mountain 
heart, as the crimson pulse does ours ; the natural force of the 
iron crag is abated m its appointed time, Uke the strength of 
the sinews in a human old age ; and it is but the lapse of the 
longer years of decay which, in the sight of its Creator, dis- 
tinguishes the mountain range from the moth and the wonn. 

And hence two questions arise of the deepest interest. 
From what first created forms were the mountains brought 
into their present condition ? into what forms will they 
change in the course of ages ? Was the world anciently in a 
more or less perfect state than it is now ? was it less or more 
fitted for the habitation of the jhuman race ? and are the 
changes which it is now undergoing fiivorable to that race or 
not ? The present conformation of the earth appears dictated, 
as has been shown in the precedmg chapters, by supreme 
wisdom and kindness. And yet its former state must have 
been diiferent from what it is now ; as its present one from 
that which it must assume hereafter. Is this, therefore, the 
earth's prime into which we are born ; or is it, with all its 
beauty, only the wreck of Paradise ? 

I cannot entangle the reader in the intricacy of the inquiries 
necessary for anything like a satisfactory solution of these 
questions. But, were he to engage in such inquu-ies, their 
result would be his strong conviction of the earth's having 
been brought from a state in which it was utterly uninhabit- 
able into one fitted for man ; of its having been, when first 
inhabitable, more beautiful than it is now ; and of its gradually 
tending to still greater inferiority of aspect, and unfitness for 
abode. 



88 NATUKE. 

It has indeed been tlie endeavor of some geologists to prove 
that destruction and renovation are continually proceeding 
simultaneously in mountains as well as in organic creatures ; 
that while existmg eminences are being slowly lowered, others, 
in order to supply their place, are being slowly elevated ; and 
that what is lost in beauty or healthiness in one spot is gained 
in another. But I cannot assent to such a conclusion. Evi- 
dence altogether incontrovertible points to a state of the earth 
in which it could be tenanted only by lower animals, fitted 
for the circumstances under which they lived by pecuhar 
organizations. From this state it is admitted gradually to 
have been brought into that in which we now see it ; and the 
circumstances of the existmg dispensation, whatever may be 
the date of its endurance, seem to me to point not less clearly 
to an end than to an origin ; to a creation, when " the earth 
was without form and void," and to a close, when it must 
either be renovated or destroyed. 

In one sense, and in one only, the idea of a continuous 
order of things is admissible, in so far as the phenomena which 
introduced, and those which are to terminate, the existing dis- 
pensation, may have been, and may in future be, nothing more 
than a gigantic development of agencies which are in con- 
tinual operation around us. The experience we possess of 
volcanic agency is not yet large enough to enable us to set 
limits to its force ; and as we see the rarity of subterraneous 
action generally proportioned to its violence, there may be 
appointed, in the natural order of things, convulsions to take 
place after certain epochs, on a scale which the human race 
has not yet lived long enough to witness. The soft silver 
cloud which writhes innocently on the crest of Vesuvius, rests 
there without intermission ; but the fury which lays cities in 
sepulchres of lava bursts forth only after intervals of centuries ; 
and the still fiercer indignation of the greater volcanoes, 



MOUNTAINS. 89 

which makes half the globe vibrate with earthquake, and 
shrivels up whole kingdoms with flame, is recorded only in 
dim distances of history : so that it is not irrational to admit 
that there may yet be powers dormant, not destroyed, beneath 
the apparently calm surface of the earth, whose date of rest is 
the endurance of the human race, and whose date of action 
must be that of its doom. But whether such colossal agencies 
are indeed in the existing order of things or not, still the 
effective truth, for us, is one and the same. The earth, as a 
tormented and trembling baU, may have rolled in space for 
myriads of ages before humanity was formed from its dust ; 
and as a devastated ruin it may continue to roll, when all that 
dust shall again have been mingled with ashes that never 
were warmed by hfe, or polluted by sin. But for us the intel- 
ligible and substantial fact is that the earth has been brought, 
by forces we know not of, into a form fitted for our habitation : 
on that form a gradual but destructive change is continually 
taking place, and the course of that change points clearly to a 
period when it wiU no more be fitted for the dweUing-place^ 
of men. 

It is, therefore, not so much what these forms of the earth 
actually are, as what they are continually becoming, that we 
have to observe ; nor is it possible thus to observe them with- 
out an instinctive reference to the first state out of which they 
have been brought. The existing torrent has dug its bed a 
thousand feet deep. But in what form was the mountain ori- 
ginally raised which gave that torrent its track and power ? 
The existing precipice is wrought into towers and bastions by 
the perpetual fall of its fragments. In what form did it stand 
before a single fragment fell ? 

Yet to such questions, continually suggesting themselves, it 
is never possible to give a complete answer. For a certain 
distance, the past work of existing forces can be traced ; but 



90 NATURE. 

there gradually the mist gathers, and the footsteps of jnore 
gigantic agencies are traceable in the darkn.'ss; and still, as 
we endeavor to penetrate farther and farther into departed 
time, the thunder of the Almighty power sounds louder and 
louder ; and the clouds gather broader and more fearfully, 
until at last the Sinai of the world is seen altogether upon a 
smoke, and the fence of its foot is reached, which none can 
break through. 

If, therefore, we venture to advance towards the spot where 
the cloud first comes down, it is rather with the purpose of 
fully pointing out that there is a cloud, than of entering into 
it. It is well to have been fully convinced of the existence of 
the mystery, in an age far too apt to suppose that everything 
which is visible is explicable, and everything that is present, 
eternal. 

In the actual form of any mountain peak, there must 
usually be traceable the shadow or skeleton of its former self; 
like the obscure indications of the first frame of a war-worn 
tower, preserved, in some places, under the heap of its ruins, 
in others to be restored in imagination from the thin remnants 
of its tottering shell ; while here and there, in some sheltered 
spot, a few unfallen stones retain their Gothic sculpture, and 
a few touches of the chisel, or stains of color, inform us of 
the whole mmd and perfect skill of the old designer. With 
this great difference, nevertheless, that in the human architec- 
ture the builder did not calculate upon ruin, nor appoint the 
course of impendent desolation ; but that in the hand of the 
great Architect of the mountains, time and decay are as much 
the instruments of His purpose as the forces by which He first 
led forth the troops of hills in leaping flocks :— the lightning 
and the torrent, and the wastmg and weariness of innume- 
rable ages, all bear their part in the working out of one con- 
sistent plan ; and the Builder of the temple for ever stands 



MOUNTAINS. 91 

beside His work, appointing the stone tbat is to fall, and the 
pUlar that is to be abased, and guiding all the seeming wild- 
ness of chance and change, into ordained splendors and fore- 
seen harmonies. ^ 

I believe, for general development of human intelligence 
and sensibility, country of this kind is about the most perfect 
that exists. A richer landscape, as that of Italy, enervates, or 
causes wantonness; a poorer contracts the conceptions, and 
hardens the temperament of both mind and body ; and one 
more curiously or prominently beautiful deadens the sense of 
beauty. Even what is here of attractiveness, — far exceeding, 
as it does, that of most of the thickly peopled districts of the 
temperate zone, — seems to act harmfully on the poetical 
character of the Swiss ; but take its inhabitants all in all, as 
with deep love and stern penetration they are pamted in the 
works of their principal writer, Gotthelf, and I beUeve we 
shall not easily find a peasantry which would completely sus- 
tain comparison with them. 

To myself, mountains are the beginning and the end of all 
natural scenery ; in them, and in the forms of inferior land- 
scape that lead to them, my affections are wholly bound up ; 
and though I can look with happy admiration at the lowland 
flowers, and woods, and open skies, the happiness is tranquil 
and cold, like that of examining detached flowers in a conser- 
vatory, or reading a pleasant book; and if the scenery be 
resolutely level, insisting upon the declaration of its own flat- 
ness in all the detail of it, as in Holland, or Lincolnshire, or 
Central Lombardy, it appears to me like a prison, and I 
cannot long endure it. But the slightest rise and fall in the 
road, — a mossy bank at the side of a crag of chalk, with 
brambles at its brow, overhanging it, — a rij^ple over three oi 
four stones in the stream by the bridge, — above all, a wild bit 



92 NATURE. 

of ferny ground under a fir or two, looking as if, possibly, one 
might see a hill if one got to the other side of the trees, will 
instantly give me intense deUght, because the shadow, or the 
hope, of the hUls is in them. 

And, in fact, much of the apparently harmful influence of 
hills on the religion of the world is nothing else than their 
general gift of exciting the poetical and inventive faculties, in 
peculiarly solemn tones of mind. Their terror leads into 
devotional casts of thought; their beauty and wildness promjjt 
the invention at the same time ; and where the mind is not 
gifted with stern reasoning powers, or protected by purity of 
teaching, it is sure to mingle the invention with its creed, and 
the vision with its prayer. Strictly speaking, we ought to 
consider the superstitions of the hills, universally, as a form of 
poetry ; regretting only that men have not ' yet learned how 
to distinguish poetry from well-founded faith. 

It has always appeared to me that there was, even in 
healthy mountain districts, a certain degree of inevitable 
melancholy ; nor could I ever escape from the feeling that 
here, where chiefly the beauty of God's working was mani- 
fested to men, warning was also given, and that to the full, of 
the enduring of His indignation against sin. 

It seems one of the most cunning and frequent of self- 
deceptions to turn the heart away from this warning and 
refuse to acknowledge anything in the fair scenes of the 
natural creation but beneficence. Men in general lean to- 
wards the light, so far as they contemplate such things at all, 
most of them passing " by on the other side," either in mere 
plodding pursuit of their own work, irrespective of what 
good or evil is around them, or else in selfish gloom, or selfish 
delight, resulting from their own circumstances at the mo- 
ment. Of those who give themselves to any true contem- 



MOUNTAINS. 93 

plation, the plurality, being humble, gentle, and kindly- 
hearted, look only in nature for what is lovely and kind; 
partly, also, God gives the disposition to every healthy human 
mind in some degree to pass over or even harden itself against 
evil things, else the suffering would be too great to be borne ; 
and humble people, with a quiet trust that ererything is for 
the best, do not fairly represent the facts to themselves, think- 
ing them none of their business. So, what between hard- 
hearted people, thoughtless people, busy people, humble 
people, and cheerfully-minded people, — giddiness of youth, 
and pre-occupations of age, — philosophies of faith, and cru- 
elties of folly, — priest and Levite, masquer and merchantman, 
all agreeing to keep their own side of the way, — the evil that 
God sends to warn us gets to be forgotten, and the CAdl that 
He sends to be mended by us gets left unmendcd. And then, 
because people shut their eyes to the dark indisputableness of 
the facts in front of them, their Faith, such as it is, is shaken 
or uprooted by every darkness in what is revealed to them. 
In the present day it is not easy to find a well-meaning man 
among oiir more earnest thinkers, who mil not take upon 
himself to dis2:)ute the whole system of redemption, because 
he cannot unravel the mystery of the punishment of sin. But 
can he unravel the mystery of the punishment of no sin ? 
Can he entirely account for all that happens to a cab-horse ? 
Has he ever looked fairly at the fate of one of those beasts as 
it is dying, — measured the work it has done, and the reward 
it has got, put his hand upon the bloody wounds through 
which its bones are piercing, and so looked up to Heaven 
with an entire understanding of Heaven's ways about the 
horse ! Yet the horse is a fact — no droam — no rcA^elation 
among the myrtle trees by night ; and the dust it dies upon, 
and the dogs that eat it, are facts ; and yonder happy person, 
whose the horse was it till its knees were broken over the 



94 NATURE. 

hui-cUes, who had an immortal soul to begin with, and wealth 
and peace to help forward his immortality; who has also 
devoted the powers of his soul, and body, and wealth, and 
peace, to the spoiling of houses, the corruption of the innocent, 
and the oppression of the jjoor ; and has, at this actual 
moment of his prosperous hfe, as many curses waiting round 
about him in calm shadow, with their death's eyes fixed upon 
him, biding their time, as ever the poor cab-horse had launched 
at him in meaningless blasphemies, when his failing feet stum- 
bled at the stones, — this happy person shall have no stripes, — 
shall have only the horse's fate of annihilation ; or, if other 
things are indeed reserved for him. Heaven's kindness or 
omnipotence is to be doubted therefore. 

We cannot reason of these things. But this I know — and 
this may by all men be known — that no good or lovely thing 
exists in this world Avithout its correspondent darkness ; and 
that the universe presents itself continually to mankind under 
the stern aspect of warning, or of choice, the good and the 
evil set on the right hand and the left. 

And in this mountain gloom, which weighs so strongly upon 
the human heart that in all time hitherto, as we have seen, the 
hill defiles have been either avoided in terror or inhabited in 
penance, there is but the fulfilment of the universal law, that 
where the beauty and wisdom of the Divine working are most 
manifested, there also are manifested most clearly the terror 
of God's wrath, and inevitableness of His power. 

Nor is this gloom less wonderful so far as it bears witness 
to the error of human choice, even when the nature of good 
and evil is most definitely set before it. The trees of Paradise 
were fixir ; but our first parents hid themselves from God " in 
medio ligni Paradisi," — in the midst of the trees of the gar- 
den. The hills Avere ordained for the help of man ; but, 
instead of raising his eyes to the hUls, from whence cometh 



MOUNTAIlsrS. 95 

his help, lie does liis idol sacrifice " ujDon every high hUl and 
under every green tree." The mountain of the Lord's house 
is established above the hills ; but Nadab and Abihu shall see 
under His feet the body of heaven in his clearness, yet go 
down to kindle the censer against their o^^^l souls. And so 
to the end of time it will be ; to the end, that cry will stUl be 
heard along the Alpine winds, " Hear, oh ye mountains, the 
Lord's controversy !" Still, their gulfs of thawless ice, and 
unretarded roar of tormented waves, and deathful falls of 
fruitless waste and unredeemed decay, must be the image of 
the souls of those who have chosen the darkness, and whose 
cry shall be to the mountains to fall on them, and to the hills 
to cover them ; and still, to the end of time, the clear waters 
of the unfailing springs, and the white pasture-lilies in their 
clothed multitude, and the abiding of the burning peaks in 
their nearness to the opened heaven, shall be the types, and 
the blessings, of those who have chosen light, and of whom it 
is written, " The mountains shall bring peace to the people, 
and the little hills, righteousness." 

How were the gigantic fields of shattered marble conveyed 
from the ledges which were to reraam exposed ? No signs of 
violence are found on these ledges ; what marks there are, the 
rain and natural decay have softly traced through a long series 
of years. Those very time-marks may have indeed effaced 
mere superficial appearances of xjonvulsion ; but could they 
have efiaced all evidence of the action of such floods as would 
have been necessary to carry bodily away the whole ruin of a 
block of marble leagues in length and breadth, and a quarter 
of a mile thick ? Ponder over the intense marvellousness of 
this. 

And yet no trace of the means by which all this was effected 
is left. The rock stands forth in its white and rugged mys- 
tery, as if its peak had been born out of the blue sky. Tbe 



96 NATURE. 

strength that raised it, and the sea that wrought upon it, have 
passed away, and left no sign ; and we have no words wherein to 
describe their departure, no thoughts to form about their action, 
than those of the perpetual and unsatisfied interrogation, — 

" What ailed thee, O thou sea, that thou fleddest ? 

And ye mountains, that ye skipped like lambs ?" 

As we i^ass beneath the hills Avhich have been shaken by 
earthquake and torn by convulsion, we find that periods of 
perfect repose succeeded those of destruction. The pools of 
calm water lie clear beneath their fallen rocks, the water- 
lilies gleam, and the reeds whisper among their shadows ; the 
village rises again over the forgotten graves, and its church- 
tower, white through the storm-twilight, proclaims a renewed 
appeal to His protection in whose hand "are all the corners 
of the earth, and the strength of the hills is His also." There 
is no loveliness of Alpine valley that does not teach the same 
lesson. It is just where "the mountain falling cometh to 
naught, and the rock is removed out of his place," that, in 
process of years, the fairest meadows bloom between the frag- 
ments, the clearest rivulets murmur from their crevices among 
the flowers, and the clustered cottages, each sheltered beneath 
some strength of mossy stone, now to be removed no more, 
and with their pastured flocks around them, safe from the 
eagle's stoop and the wolf's ravin, have written upon their 
fronts, in simple words, the mountaineer's faith m the ancient 
promise — 

"Neither shalt thou be afraid of destruction when it cometh ; 

"For thou shalt be in league with the Stones of the Field; 
and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee." 

The idea of retirement from the world for the sake of self- 
mortification, of combat A^dth demons, or communion with 



MOUNTAINS. 97 

angels, and with their king, — authoritatively commended as it 
was to all men by the continual practice of Christ Himself, — 
gave to all mountain solitude at once a sanctity and a terror, 
in the mediaeval mind, which were altogether different from 
anything that it had possessed in the un-Christian periods. 
On the one side, there was an idea of sanctity attached to 
rocky wilderness, because it had always been among liills that 
the Deity had manifested himself most intimately to men, and 
to the hills that His saints had nearly always retired for medi- 
tation, for especial communion with Him, and to prepare for 
death. Men acquainted with the histojy of Moses, alone at 
Horeb, or with Israel at Sinai, — of Elijah by the brook Cherith, 
and in the Horeb cave ; of the deaths of Moses and Aaron on 
Hor and Xebo ; of the preparation of Jophthah's daughter for 
her death among the Judea Mountains ; of the continual 
retirement of Christ himself to the mountains for prayer, His 
temptation in the desert of the Dead Sea, His sei'mon on the 
hills of Capernaum, His transfiguration on the crest of Tabor, 
and his evening and morning walks over Olivet for the four 
or five days preceding His crucifixion, — were not likely to 
look with u-reverent or unloving eyes upon the blue hills 
that girded their golden horizon, or drew upon them the 
mysterious clouds out of the height of the darker heaven. 
But with this impression of their greater sanctity was involved 
also that of a peculiar terror. In all this, — their haunting by 
the memories of prophets, the presences of angels, and the 
everlasting thoughts and words of the Redeemer, — the moun- 
tain ranges seemed separated from the active world, and only 
to be fitly approached by hearts which were condemnatory of 
it. Just in so much as it appeared necessary for the noblest 
men to retire to the hill-recesses before their missions could 
be accomplished or their spirits perfected, in so far did the 
daily world seem by comparison to be pronounced p • ofane 

5 



98 NATURE. 

and dangerous; and to those who loved tl/at woild, and its 
work, the mountains were thus voiceful with perpetual 
rebuke, and necessarily contemplated with a kind of pain and 
fear, such as a man engrossed by vanity, feels at being by 
some accident forced to hear a startling sermon, or to assist 
at a funeral service. Every association of this kind was 
deepened by the practice and precept of the time ; and 
thousands of hearts, which might otherwise have felt that 
there was loveliness in the wild landscape, shrank from it in 
dread, because they knew the monk retired to it for penance, 
and the hermit for contemplation. 

Mark the significance of the earliest mention of mountains 
in the Mosaic books ; at least, of those in which some Divine 
appointment or command is stated respecting them. They are 
first brought before us as refuges for God's people from the 
two judgments of water and fire. The ark rests upon the 
" mountains of Ararat ;" and man, having passed through 
that great baptism unto death, kneels upon the earth first 
where it is nearest heaven, and mingles with the mountain 
clouds the smoke of his sacrifice of thanksgiving. Again : from 
the midst of the first judgment of fire, the command of the 
Deity to his servant is, " Escape to the mountain ;" and the 
morbid fear of the hills, which fiUs any human mind after long 
stay in places of luxury and sin, is strangely marked in Lot's 
complaining reply : " I cannot escape to the moimtain, lest 
some evil take me." The third mention, in way of ordinance, 
is a far more solemn one : " Abraham lifted up his eyes, and 
saw the place afar ofil" "The Place," the Mountain of 
Myrrh, or of bitterness, chosen to fulfil to all the seed of 
Abraham, far ofi" and near, the inner meaning of promise 
regarded in that vow : ** I will lift up my eyes unto the hills, 
from whence coracth mine help." 



MOUNTAINS. ya 

And the foxirth is the delivery of the law on Sinai. 

It seemed, then, to the monks, that the mountains were 
appointed by their Maker to be to man refuges from Judg- 
ment, signs of Redemption, and altars of Sanctification and 
obedience ; and they saw them afterwards connected in the 
manner the most touching and gracious, with the death, after 
his task had been accomplished, of the first anointed Priest ; 
the death, in like manner, of the first inspired Lawgiver; 
and, lastly, with the assumption of his office by the Eternal 
Priest, Lawgiver, and Saviour. 

Observe the connection of these three events. Although 
the time of the deaths of Aaron and Moses was hastened by 
God's displeasure, we have not, it seems to me, the sUghtest 
warrant for concluding that the manner of their deaths was 
intended to be grievous or dishonorable to them. Far from 
this : it cannot, I think, be doubted that in the denial of the 
permission to enter the Promised Land, the whole punishment 
of their sins was included ; and that as far as regarded the 
manner of their deaths, it must have been appointed for them 
by their Master in all tenderness and love ; and with full pur- 
pose of ennobling the close of their service upon the earth. 
It might have seemed to us more honorable that both should 
have been permitted to die beneath the shadow of the Taber- 
nacle, the congregation of Israel watching by their side ; and 
all whom they loved gathered together to receive the last 
message from the lips of the meek lawgiver, and the last bless- 
ing from the prayer of the anointed priest. But it was not 
thus that they were permitted to die. Try to realize that 
going foilh of Aaron from the midst of the congregation. 
He who had so often done sacrifice for their sins, going forth 
now to offer up his own spirit. He Avho had stood among 
them, between the dead and the living, and had seen the eyes 
of nil that great multitude turned to him. that by his interces- 



100 NATURE. 

sion their breath might yet be drawn a moment more, going 
forth now to meet the Angel of Death face to face, and deliver 
himself into his hand. Try if you cannot walk, in thought, 
with those two brothers, and the son, as they passed the out- 
most tents of Israel, and turned, while yet the dew lay roimd 
about the camp, towards the slopes of Mount Hor ; talking 
together for the last time, as step by step, they felt the 
steeper rising of the rocks, and hour after hour, beneath the 
ascending sun, the horizon grew broader as they climbed, and 
all the folded hiUs of Idumea, one by one subdued, showed 
amidst their hollows in the haze of noon, the windings of that 
long desert journey, now at last to close. But who shall enter 
into the thoughts of the High Priest, as his eye followed those 
paths of ancient pilgrimage ; and, through the silence of the 
arid and endless hills, stretchmg even to the dim peak of 
Sinai, the whole history of those forty years was unfolded 
before him, and the mystery of his own ministries revealed 
to him ; and that other Holy of HoUes, of which the mountain 
peaks were the altars, and the mountain clouds the veil, the 
firmament of his Father's dwelling, opened to him stUl more 
brightly and infinitely as he drew nearer his death ; untU at 
last, on the shadeless summit, — from him on whom sm was to 
be laid no more — from him, on whose heart the names of sinful 
nations were to press their graven fire no longer,^the brother 
and the son took breastplate and ephod, and left him to his rest. 
There is indeed a secretness in this calm faith and deep 
restraint of sorrow, into which it is difiicult for us to enter ; 
but the death of Moses himself is more easily to be conceived, 
and had in it circumstances stiQ more touching, as far as 
regards the influence of the external scene. For forty years 
Moses had not been alone. The care and burden of all the 
people, the weight of their woe, and guilt, and death, had 
been upon him continually. The multitude had been laid 



MOUNTAINS. 101 

upon him as if he had conceived them ; their tears had been 
his meat, night and day, until he had felt as if God had with- 
drawn His favor from hun, and he had prayed that he might 
be slain, and not see his wretchedness.* And now, at last, the 
command came, " Get thee up into this mountain." The weary 
hands that had been so long stayed up against the enemies of 
Israel, might lean again upon the shepherd's staff, and fold 
themselves for the shejAerd's prayer — for the shepherd's 
slumber. Not strange to his feet, though forty years un- 
known, the roughness of the bare mountain-path, as he 
climbed from ledge to ledge of Abarim ; not strange to his 
aged eyes the scattered clusters of the mountain herbage, and 
the broken shadows of the cliffs, indented far across the 
silence of uninhabited ravines ; scenes such as those among 
which, w^th none, as now, beside him but God, he had led his 
flocks so often; and which he had left, how painfully! takmg 
upon him the appointed power, to make of the fenced city a 
■wnlderness, and to fill the desert with songs of deliverance. 
It was not to embitter the last hours of his hfe that God 
restored to him, for a day, the beloved solitudes he had lost ; 
and breathed the peace of the perpetual hills around him, and 
cast the world in which he had labored and sinned far beneath 
his feet, in that mist of dying blue ; — all sin, all wandering, 
soon to be forgotten for ever ; the Dead Sea — a type of God's 
anger understood by him, of all men, most clearly, who had 
seen the earth open her mouth, and the sea his depth, to over- 
whelm the companies of those who contended with his Master 
— laid waveless beneath him ; and beyond it, the foir hills of 
Judah, and the soft plains and banks of Jordan, purple in the 
evening light as with the blood of redemption, and fading in 
their distant fulness into mysteries of promise and of love. 

* Numbers xi. 12, 15. 



102 NATURE. 

There, with his unabated strength, his undiramed glance, 
lying down upon the utmost rocks, with angels waiting near 
to contend for the spoils of his spirit, he put off his earthly 
armor. We do deep reverence to his companion prophet, for 
whom the chariot of fire came down from heaven ; but was 
his death less noble, whom his Lord Himself buried in the 
vales of Moab, keeping, in the secrets of the eternal counsels, 
the knowledge of a sepulchre, from which he was to be called, 
in the fulness of time, to talk with that Lord upon Hermon, 
of the death that He should accomplish at Jerusalem ? 

And lastly, let us turn our thoughts for a few moments to 
the cause of the resurrection of these two i^rophets. We a/e 
all of us too much in the habit of passing it by, as a thing 
mystical and inconceivable, taking place in the life of Christ 
for some purpose not by us to be understood, or, at the best, 
merely as a manifestation of His divinity by brightness of 
heavenly light, and the ministering of the spirits of the dead, 
intended to strengthen the faith of His three chosen apostles. 
And in this, as in many other events recorded by the Evange- 
lists, we lose half the meaning and evade the practical power 
upon ourselves, by never accepting in its fulness the idea that 
our Lord was " perfect man," " tempted in all things hke as 
we are." Our preachers are contmually trying, in all manner 
of subtle ways, to explain the union of the Divinity with the 
Manhood, an explanation which certainly involves first their 
being able to describe the nature of Deity itself, or, in 
plain words, to comprehend God. They never can explain 
in any one particular, the union of the natures ; they only suc- 
ceed in weakening the faith of their hearers as to the entire- 
ness of either. The thing they have to do is precisely the 
contrary to this — to insist upon the entireness of both. We 
never thmk of Christ enough as God, never enough as Man ; 
the instinctive habit of our minds being always to miss of the 



MOUNTAINS. 103 

Divinity, and the reasoning and enforced habit to miss of the 
Humanity. We are afraid to harbor in om- own hearts, or to 
utter in the hearing of others, any thought of our Lord, as 
hungering, tired, sorrowful, having a human soul, a human 
will, and afiected by events of human life as a finite creature 
is ; and yet one half of the efficiency of Plis atonement, and the 
whole of the efficiency of His example, depend on His having 
been this to the full. 

Consider, therefore, the Transfiguration as it relates to the 
human feelings of our Lord. It was the first definite prepa- 
ration for His death. He had foretold it to His disciples six 
days before ; then takes with Him the three chosen ones into 
" an high mountain apart." From an exceeding high moun- 
tain, at the first taking on Him the ministry of life. He had 
beheld, and rejected the kingdoms of the earth and their 
glory: now, on a high mountain. He takes upon Him the 
ministry of death. Peter, and they that were with him, as in 
Gethsemane, were heavy with sleep. Christ's work had to be 
done alone. 

/ yhe traditio n is, that the Mount of Transfiguration was the 
summit of Tabor ; but Tabor is neither a high mountain, nor , 
was it in any sense a mountain " apart;'''' being in those years 
both inhabited and fortified. All the immediately preceding 
ministries of Christ had been at Cesarea Philijjpi. There is 
no mention of travel southward in the six days that inter- 
vened between the warning given to His disciples, and the 
going up into the hiU. What other hill could it be than the 
southward slope of that goodly mountain, Hermon, Avhich is 
indeed the centre of all the Promised Land, from the entering 
in of Hamath unto the river of Egypt ; the mount of fruit- 
fulness, from which the springs of Jordan descended to the 
valleys of Israel. Along its mighty forest avenues, until the 
grass grew fair with the mountain lilies His feet dashed in 



104 NATURE. 

the dew of Hermon, lie must have gone to pray His first 
recorded prayer about death ; and from the steep of it, before 
He knelt, could see to the south all the dwelling-place of the 
people that had sat in darkness, and seen the great light, the 
land of Zabulon and of Naphtali, Galilee of the nations ;— 
could see, even with His human sight, the gleam of that lake 
by Capernaum and Chorazin, and many a place loved by 
Him, and vainly ministered to, whose house was now left 
unto them desolate ; and, chief of all, far in the utmost blue, 
the hills above Nazareth, sloping down to His old home : hilla 
on which yet the stones lay loose, that had been taken up to 
cast at Him, when He left them for ever, 

" And as he prayed, two men stood by him." Among 
many ways in which we miss the help and hold of Scripture, 
none is more subtle than our habit of supposing that, even as 
man, Christ was free from the Fear of Death. How could He 
then have been tempted as we are ? since among all the trials 
of the earth, none spring from the dust more terrible than 
that Fear. It had to be borne by Him indeed, in a unity, 
which we can never comprehend, with the foreknowledge of 
victory, — as His sorrow for Lazarus, with the consciousness of 
the power to restore him ; but it had to be borne, and that in 
its full earthly terror ; and the presence of it is surely marked 
for us enough by the rising of those two at His side. When, 
in the desert, he was girding himself for the work of life, 
angels of life came and ministered unto Him ; now, in the 
fair world, when He is girding himself for the work of death, 
the rainistrants come to Him from the grave. 

But from the grave conquered. One, from that tomb under 
Abarim, which His own hand had sealed so long ago; the 
other from the rest into which he had entered, without seeing 
corruption. There stood by Him Moses and Elias, and spake 
of His decease. 



TREES. 105 

Then, when the prayer is ended, the task accepted, first, 
shice the star paused over Him at Bethlehem, the full glory 
falls upon Him from heaven, and the testimony is borne to 
his everlasting Sonship and power. " Hear ye him," 

If, in their remembrance of these things, and in their endea- 
vor to follow in the footsteps of their Master, religious men 
of by-gone days, closing themselves in the hill solitudes, forgot 
sometimes, and sometimes feared, the duties they owed to the 
active world, we may perhaps pardon them more easily than 
we ought to pardon ourselves, if we neither seek any influ- 
ence for good nor submit to it unsought, in scenes to which 
thus all the men whose writings we receive as inspired, toge- 
ther with their Lord, retired whenever they had any task or 
trial laid upon them needing more than their usual strength 
of spirit. Nor, perhaps, should we have unprofitably entered 
into the mind of the earlier ages, if among our other thoughts, 
as we Avatch the chains of the snowy mountains rise on the 
horizon, we should sometimes admit the memory of the hour 
in which their Creator, among their solitudes, entered on His 
travail for the salvation of our race ; and indulge the dream, 
that as the flaming and trembling mountains of the earth 
seem to be the monuments of the manifesting of His terror on 
Sinai, — these pure and white hills, near to the heaven, and 
sources of all good to the earth, are the appointed memorials 
of that Light of His Mercy, that fell, snow-like, on the Mount 
of Transfigui'ation. / 



TREES. 



In speaking of trees generally, be it observed, when I say 
all trees I mean o!ily those ordinary forest or copse trees of 



1 06 NATURE. 

Europe, wWcli ai'e the chief subjects of the landscape paintt r. 
T do not mean to inchxde every kind of foliage which by any 
accident can find its way into a picture, but the ordinary 
trees of Europe, — oak, elm, ash, hazel, willow, birch, beech, 
poplar, chestnut, pine, mulberry, olive, ilex, carubbe, and such 
others. I do not purpose to examine the characteristics of 
each tree ; it will be enough to observe the laws common to 
all. First, then, neither the stems nor the boughs of any of 
the above trees taper, except where they fork. Wherever a 
stem sends off a branch, or a branch a lesser bough, or a lesser 
bough a bud, the stem or the branch is, on the instant, less in 
diameter by the exact quantity of the branch or the bough 
they have sent off, and they remain of the same diameter ; or 
if there be any change, rather increase than diminish until 
they send off another branch or bough. This law is impera- 
tive and without exception ; no bough, nor stem, nor twig, 
ever tapering or becoming narrower towards its extremity by 
a hairbreadth, save where it parts with some portion of its 
substance at a fork or bud, so that if all the twigs and sprays 
at the top and sides of the tree, Avhich are, and have been, 
could be imited without loss of space, they would form a 
round log of the diameter of the trunk from which they 
spring. 

But as the trunks of most trees send off twigs and sprays 
of light under foliage, of which every individual fibre takes 
precisely its own thickness of wood from the parent stem, and 
as many of these drop off, leavmg nothing but a small excres- 
cence to record their existence, there is frequently a slight 
and delicate appearance of tapering bestowed on the trunk 
itself; while the same operation takes place much more exten- 
sively in the branches, it being natural to almost all trees to 
send out from their young limbs more Avood than they can 
support, which, as the stem increases, gets contracted at the 



» TREES. 107 

point of insertion, so as to check the flow of the sap, and then 
dies and drops off, leaving all along the bough, first on one 
side, then on another, a series of small excrescences, sufficient 
to account for a degree of tapering, which is yet so very 
slight, that if we select a portion of a branch with no real fork 
or living bough to divide it or diminish it, the tapering is 
scarcely to be detected by the eye ; and if we select a portion 
without such evidence of past ramification, there will be foimd 
none whatsoever. 

But nature takes great care and pains to conceal this uni- 
formity in her boughs. They are perpetually parting with 
little sprays here and there, which steal away their substance 
cautiously, and where the eye does not perceive the theft, 
until, a little way above, it feels the loss ; and in the upper 
parts of the tree, the ramifications take place so constantly 
and delicately, that the effect upon the eye is precisely the 
same as if the boughs actually tapered, except here and there, 
where some avaricious one, greedy of substance, runs on for 
two or three yards without parting with anything, and 
becomes imgraceful in so doing. 

Hence we see that although boughs may, and must be 
represented as actually tapering, they must only be so when 
they are sending off foliage and sprays, and when they are at 
such a distance that the particular forks and divisions cannot 
be evident to the eye; and farther, even in such circum 
stances the tapering never can be sudden or rapid. No 
bough ever, with appearance of smooth tapering, loses more 
than one-tenth of its diameter in a length of ten diameters. 
Any greater diminution than this must be accounted for by 
A isible ramification, and must take place by steps, at each fork. 

One of the most remarkable characters of natural leafage ia 
the constancy Avith which, while the leaves are arranged on 
the spray with exquisite regularity, that regularity is niorli- 



108 NATURE. 

fied in their actual effect. For as in every group of leaves 
some are seen sideways, forming merely long lines, some 
foreshortened, some crossing each other, every one differently 
turned and placed from all the others, the forms of the 
leaves, though in themselves similar, give rise to a thousand 
strange and differing forms in the group ; and the shadows of 
some, passing over the others, still farther disguise and con- 
fuse the mass, until the eye can distinguish nothing but a 
graceful and flexible disorder of innumerable forms, with here 
and there a perfect leaf on the extremity, or a symmetrical 
association of one or two, just enough to mark the specific 
character and to give unity and grace, but never enough to 
repeat in one group what was done in another — never enough 
to prevent the eye from feeling that, however regular and 
mathematical may be the structure of parts, what is composed 
out of them is as various and infinite as any other part of 
nature. Nor does this take j)lace in general, effect only. 
Break off an elm bough, three feet long, in full leaf, and lay 
it on the table before you, and try to draw it, leaf for leaf. It 
is ten to one if in the whole bough, (provided you do not twist 
it about as you work,) you find one form of a leaf exactly like 
another ; perhaps you will not even have one complete. Every 
.eaf wiU be oblique, or foreshortened, or curled, or crossed by 
another, or shaded by another, or have something or other the 
matter with it ; and though the whole bough will look grace- 
ful and symmetrical, you will scarcely be able to tell how or 
why it does so, since there is not one line of it like another. 

The last and most important truth to be observed respecting 
trees, is that their boughs always, in finely grown individuals, 
bear among themselves such a ratio of length as to describe 
with their extremities a symmetrical curve, constant for each 
species ; and within this curve all the irregularities, segments, 
and divisions of the tree are included, each bough reaching tho 



TEEES. 109 

limit with its extremity, but not passing it. When a tree is per 
fectly grown, each bough starts from the trunk with just so 
much wood as, allowing for constant ramification, will enable 
it to reach the terminal line ; or if by mistake, it start with 
too little, it will proceed without ramifying till within a dis- 
tance where it may safely divide ; if on the contrary it start 
Avith too much, it will ramify quickly and constantly ; or, to 
express the real operation more accurately, each bough, grow- 
ing on so as to keep even with its neighbors, takes so much 
wood from the trunk as is sufficient to enable it to do so, 
more or less in proportion as it ramifies fast or slowly. In 
badly grown trees, the boughs are apt to fall short of tlie 
curve, or at least, there are so many jags and openings that its 
symmetry is interrupted ; and in young trees, the impatience 
of the upper shoots frequently breaks the line ; but in perfect 
and mature trees, every bough does its duty completely, and 
the line of curve is quite filled up, and the mass within it un- 
broken, so that the tree assumes the shape of a dome, as in 
the oak, or, in tall trees, of a pear, with the stalk downmost. 

It is possible among plains, in the species of trees which 
properly belong to them, the poplars of Amiens, for instance, 
to obtain a serene simplicity of grace, which, as I said, is a 
better help to the study of gracefulness, as such, than any of 
the wilder groupings of the hills ; so also, there are certain 
conditions of symmetrical luxuriance developed in the park 
and avenue, rarely rivalled in their way among mountains ; 
and yet the mountain superiority m foliage is, on the whole, 
nearly as complete as it is in water ; for exactly as there are 
some expressions in the broad reaches of a navigable lowland 
river, such as the Loire or Thames, not, in their way, to be 
matched among the rock rivers, and yet for all that a low- 
lander cannot be said to have truly seen the element of water 
at all ; so even in his richest parks and avenues he cannot bo 



110 NATURE. 

said to have truly seen ti'ees. For the resources of trees are 
not developed until they have difficulty to contend with ; 
neither their tenderness of brotherly love and harmony, till 
they are forced to choose their ways of various life where 
there is contracted room for them, talking to each other with 
their restrained branches. The various action of trees rooting 
themselves in inhospitable rocks, stooping to look into ravines, 
hiding from the search of glacier winds, reaching forth to the 
rays of rare sunshine, crowding down together to drink at 
sweetest streams, climbing hand in hand among the difficult 
slopes, opening in sudden dances round the mossy knolls, 
gathering into companies at rest among the fragrant fields, 
gliding in grave procession over the heavenward ridges, — 
nothing of this can be conceived among the unvexed and 
unvaried felicities of the lowland forest : while to all these 
direct sources of greater beauty are added, first the power of 
redundance, — the mere quality of foliage visible in the folds 
and on the promontories of a single Alp being greater than 
that of an entire lowland landscape (unless a view from some 
cathedral tower) ; and to this charm of redundance, that of 
clearer visibility^ — tree after tree being constantly shown in 
successive height, one behind another, instead of the mere 
tops and flanks of masses, as in the plains ; and the forms of 
multitudes of them continually defined against the clear sky, 
near and above, or against white clouds entangled among 
their branches, instead of being confused in dimness of distance. 

There was only one thing belonging to hills that Shake- 
spere seemed to feel as noble — the pine tree, and that was 
because he had seen it in "Warwickshire, clumps of pine occa- 
sionally rising on little sandstone mounds, as at the place of 
execution of Piers Gaveston, above the lowland MOods. He 
touches on this tree fondly again and again. 



TBEES. 11] 

" As rough, 
Tlieii- royal blood enchafed, as the rud'sfc wind, 
That by his top doth take the mountain puie, 
And make him stoop to the vale." 

" The strong-based promontory 
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up 
The pine and cedar." 

Where note his observance of the pecuhar hoi-izontal roots of 
the pine, spurred as it is by them like the claw of a bird, and 
partly propped, as the aiguilles by those rock promontories 
at their bases which I have always called their spurs, this 
observance of the pine's strength and animal-like grasp being 
the chief reason for his choosing it, above all other trees, for 
Ariel's prison. Again : 

" You may as well forbid the mountain puies 
To wag their high tops, and to make no noise 
When they are fretted with the gusts of heaven." 

And yet again : 

" But when, from under this terrestrial ball, 
He fires the proud tops of the eastern pmes." 

I challenge the untravelled English reader to tell me what 
an olive-tree is like? 

I know he cannot answer my challenge. He has no more 
idea of an olive-tree than if olives grew only in the fixed stars. 
Let him meditate a little on this one fact, and consider its 
strangeness, and what a wilful and constant closing of the 
eyes to the most important truths it indicates on the part of 
the modern artist. Observe, a want of perception, not of 
science. I do not want painters to tell me any scientific flicts 
about olive-trees. But it had been well for them to have felt 
and seen the olive-tree; to have loved it for Christ's sake, 



112 NATUBE. 

partly also for the helmed Wisdom's sake which was to the 
heathen in some sort as that nobler Wisdom which stood at 
God's right hand, when He founded the earth and estabUshed 
the heavens. To have loved it even to the hoary dimness of 
its delicate foUage, subdued and faint of hue, as if the ashea 
of the Gethsemane agony had been cast upon it for ever ; and 
to have traced, hue for line, the gnarled writhings of its intri- 
cate branches, and the pointed fretwork of its hght and 
narrow leaves, inlaid on the blue field of the sky, and the 
small rosy-white stars of its spring blossoming, and the beads 
of sable fruit scattered by autumn along its topmost boughs — 
the right, in Israel, of the stranger, the fatherless, and the 
widow, — and, more than all, the softness of the mantle, silver 
grey, and tender like the down on a bird's breast, mth which, 
far away, it veils the undulation of the mountains ; these it 
had been well for them to have seen and drawn, whatever 
they had left unstudied in the gallery. 

The Greek' delighted in the grass for its usefulness; the 
medioeval, as also we moderns, for its color and beauty. But 
both dwell on it as the first element of the lovely land.^ape ; 
Dante thinks the righteous spirits of the heathen enough com- 
forted in Hades by having even the image of green grass put 
beneath their feet ; the happy resting-place in Purgatory has 
no other delight than its grass and flowers ; and, finally, in the 
terrestrial paradise, the feet of Matilda pause where the Lethe 
stream first bends the blades of grass. Consider a little what 
a depth there is in this great instinct of the human race. 
Gather a single blade of grass, and examine for a minute, 
quietly, its narrow sword-shaped strip of fluted green. No- 
thing, as it seems there, of notable goodness or beauty. A 
very little strength, and a very little tallness, and a few delicate 
ong lines meeting in a point, — not a perfect point neither. 



GKASS. 113 

but blunt and unfinished, by no means a creditable or appa- 
rently much cared for example of Nature's workmanship; 
made, as it seems, only to be trodden on to-day, and to-mor- 
row to be cast into the oven ; and a little pale and hollow 
stalk, feeble and flaccid, leading down to the dull brown fibres 
of roots. And yet, think of it well, and judge whether of all 
the gorgeous flowers that beam in summer air, and of all strong 
and goodly trees, pleasant to the eyes and good for food, — 
stately palm and pine, strong ash and oak, scented citron, 
burdened vine, — there be any by man so deeply loved, by 
God so highly graced, as that narrow point of feeble green. 
It seems to me not to have been without a peculiar signifi- 
cance, that our Lord, when about to work the miracle which, 
of all that He showed, appears to have been felt by the multi- 
tude as the most impressive, — the miracle of the loaves, — 
commanded the people to sit do^vn by companies " upon the 
green grass." He was about to feed them Avith the principal 
produce of earth and the sea, the simplest representations of 
the food of mankind. He gave them the seed of the herb ; 
He bade them sit down upon the herb itself, which was as 
great a gift, in its fitness for their joy and rest, as its perfect 
fruit, for their sustenance ; thixs, in this single order and act, 
when rightly understood, indicating for evermore how the 
Creator had entrusted the comfort, consolation, and suste- 
nance of man, to the simplest and most despised of all the 
leafy families of the earth. And well does it fulfil its mission. 
'tI!onsider what we owe merely to the meadow grass, to the 
covering of the dark ground by that glorious enamel, by the 
companies of those soft, and countless, and peaceful spears. 
The fields ! Follow but forth for a little time the thoughts 
of all that we ought to recognise in those words. All spring 
and summer is in them, — the walks by silent, scented paths, — • 
the rests in noonday heat, — the joy of herds and flocks, — the 



1 1 4 NATUEE. 

power of all shepherd life and meditation, — the life of sunlight 
upon the world, faUing in emerald streaks, and failing m soft 
blue shadows, where else it would have struck upon the dark 
mould, or scorching dust, — j^astures beside the pacing brooks, 
soft banks and knolls of lowly hills, — thymy slopes of down 
overlooked by the blue line of lifted sea, — crisp lawns all dim 
Avith early dew, or smooth in evening w^armth of barred sun- 
shine, dinted by happy feet, and softening in their fall the 
sound of loving voices : all these are summed in those simple 
words ; and these are not all. We may not measure to the 
full the depth of this heavenly gift, in our own land ; though 
still, as we think of it longer, the infinite of that meadow 
sweetness, Shakspere's peculiar joy, wovild open on us more 
and more, yet we have it but in part. Go out, in the spring 
time, among the meadows that slope from the shores of the 
Swiss lakes to the roots of their lower mountains. There, 
mingled with the taller gentians and the Avhite narcissus, the 
grass grows . deep and free ; and as you follow the winding 
mountain paths, beneath archmg boughs all veiled and dim 
with blossom, — paths that for ever droop and rise over 
the green banks and mounds sweeping down in scented undu- 
lation, steep to the blue water, studded here and there Avith 
new-mown heaps, filling all the air with fointer sweetness, — 
look up towards the higher hills, where the waves of ever- 
lasting green roll silently into their long inlets among the 
shadoAvs of the pines ; and we may, perhajis, at last knoAV the 
meaning of those quiet Avords of the 147th Psalm, "He 
maketli grass to grow upon the mountains." 

There are also several lessons symbolically connected with 
this subject, Avhich we must not alloAv to escape us. Observe, 
the peculiar characters of the grass, Avhich adapt it especially 
for the service of man, are its apparent humility and cheerftd- 
ness. Its humility, in that it seems created only for lowest 



GRASS. 115 

service, — appointed to be trodden on, and fed upjn. Ita 
cheerfulness, in that it seems to exult under all kinds of 
violence and suffering. You roll it, and it is stronger the 
next day ; you mow it, and it multiplies its shoots, as if it 
were grateful ; you tread upon it, and it only sends up richer 
perfume. Spring comes, and it rejoices with all the earth, — 
glowing with variegated flame of flowers, — waving in soft 
depth of fruitful strength. Winter comes, and though it will 
not mock its fellow plants by growing then, it will not pine and 
mourn, and turn colorless or leafless as they. It is always green ; 
and it is only the brighter and gayer for the hoar-frost. 

Now, these two characters — of humility, and joy under 
trial — are exactly those which most definitely distinguish the 
Christian from the Pagan spirit. Whatever virtue the pagan 
possessed was rooted in pride, and fruited with sorrow. It 
began in the elevation of his own nature ; it ended but in the 
" verde smalto" — the hopeless green — of the Elysian fields. 
But the Christian vktue is rooted in self-debasement, and 
strengthened under suffering by gladness of hope. And 
remembering this, it is curious to observe how utterly Avithout 
gladness the Greek heart appears to be in watching the flower- 
ing grass, and what strange discords of expression arise some- 
times in consequence. There is one, recurring once or t^nce 
in Homer, which has always pained me. He says, " the Greek 
army was on the fields, as thick as flowers in the spring," 
It might be so ; but flowers in spring time are not the image 
by which Dante would have numbered soldiers on their path 
of battle. Dante could not have thought of the flowering 
of the grass but as associated with happiness. There is a 
still deeper significance in a passage from Homer, describing 
Ulysses casting himself down on the rushes and the corn-giving 
land at the river shore, — the rushes and corn being to him 
only good for rest and sustenance, — when we compare it with 



116 NATURE. 

that in which Dante tells us he was ordered to descend to the 
shore of the lake as he entered Purgatory, to gather a rush^ 
and gird himself with it, it being to him the emblem not only 
of rest, but of humility under chastisement, the rush (or reed) 
being the only plant which can grow there ; — " no plant which 
bears leaves, or hardens its bark, can Uve on that shore, be- 
cause it does not yield to the chastisement of its Avaves." It 
cannot but strike the reader singularly how deep and harmoni- 
ous a sicrnificance runs throujjh all these words of Dante — how 
every syllable of them, the more we penetrate it, becomes a 
seed of farther thought. For, follow up this image of the 
girdling with the reed, under trial, and see to whose feet it 
will lead us. As the grass of the earth, thought of as the herb 
yielding seed, leads us to the place where our Lord commanded 
the multitude to sit down by companies upon the green grass ; 
so the grass of the waters, thought of as sustaining itself among 
the waters of affliction, leads us to the place where a stem of 
it was put into our Lord's hand for his sceptre ; and in the 
crown of thorns, and the rod of reed, was foreshown the ever- 
lasting truth of the Christian ages — that all glory was to be 
begun in suffering, and all power in humility. 

Assembling the images we have traced, and adding the 
simplest of all, from Isaiah xl, 6., we find, the grass and 
flowers are types, in their passing, of the passing of human 
life, and, in their excellence, of the excellence of human life ; 
and this in a twofold way ; first, by their Beneficence, and 
then, by their endurance : — the grass of the earth, in giving 
the seed of corn, and in its beauty under tread of foot and 
stroke of scythe ; and the grass of the waters, in giving its 
freshness for our rest, and in its bending before the wave.* 

* So also in Isa. xxxv. 7., the prevalence of righteousness and peace over 
all evil is thus foretold : 

"In the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass, with reeds 
«nd riishes.^^ 



GRASS. 117 

But understood in the broad human and Divine sense, the 
" herb yielding seed" (as opposed to the fruit-tree yielding fruit) 
includes a third family of plants, and fulfils a third office to 
the human race. It includes the great family of the lints and 
flaxes, and fulfils thus the three ofiices of giving food, raiment, 
and rest. Follow out this fulfilment ; consider the association 
of the linen garment and the linen embroidery, with the 
priestly ofiice, and the furniture of the tabernacle ; and con- 
sider how the rush has been, in all tune, the first natural car- 
pet thrown under the human foot. Then next observe the 
three virtues definitely set forth by the three families of 
plants ; not arbitrarily or fancifully associated with them, but 
in all the three cases marked for us by Scriptural words : 

1st. Cheerfulness, or joyful serenity ; in the grass for food 
and beauty. — " Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow ; 
they toil not, neither do they spin." 

2nd. Humility; in the grass for rest. — "A bruised reed 
shall He not break." 

3rd. Love ; in the grass for clothing (because of its swift 
kindling), — "The smoking flax shall he not quench." 

And then, finally, observe the confirmation of these last two 
images in, I suppose, the most important prophecy, relating 
to the future state of the Christian Church, which occurs in 
the Old Testament, namely, that contained in the closing 
chapters of Ezekiel. The measures of the Temple of God are 
to be taken ; and because it is only by charity and humility 
that those measures ever can be taken, the angel has " a line 
of flax in his hand, and a measuring reedP The use of the 
Ime was to measure the land, and of the reed to take the 
dimensions of the buildings; so the buildings of the church, or 
its labors, are to be measured by humility^ and its territory or 
land, by love. 

The limits of the Church have, indeed, in later days, been 



118 ' NATURE. 

measured, to the world's sorrow, by another kind of flaxen 
Ime, burning with the fire of unholy zeal, not with that of 
Christian charity ; and perhaps the best lesson which we can 
finally take to ourselves, in leaving these sweet fields, is the 
memory that, in spite of all the fettered habits of thought of 
Ins age, this great Dante, this inspired exponent of what lay 
deepest at the heart of the early Church, placed his terrestrial 
paradise where there had ceased to be fence or division, and 
where the grass of the earth was bowed down, in unity of 
direction, only by the soft waves that bore with them the for 
getfulness of evil. 



jpart 3. 
ARCHITECTURE 



Every man has at some time of his life personal interest in Architecture 
He has influence on the design of some public building; or he has to buy, or 
build, or alter his own house. It signifies less whether the knowledge of 
other arts be general or not; men may live without buying pictures or 
statues. They must do mischief, and waste their money if tliey do not 
know how to turn it to account. 



Part 3. 

ARCHITECTURE. 
ART. 

Architecttjre (considered as a fine art) is the art which so 
disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man for whatsoever 
uses, that the sight of them contribute to his mental health, 
power, and pleasure. 

Architecture proper, then, naturally arranges itself under 
five heads : — 

Devotional ; including all buildings raised for God's service 
or honor. 

Memorial ; including both monuments and tombs. 

Civil ; including every edifice raised by nations or societies, 
for purposes of common business or pleasure. 

MiHtary ; including all private and public architecture of 
defence. 

Domestic ; including every rank and kind of dwelling-place. 

Those peculiar aspects which belong to the first of the arts, 
I have endeavored to trace ; and since, if truly stated, they 
must necessarily be, not only safeguards against error, but 
sources of every measure of success, I do not think I claim 
too much for them in calling them the Lamps of Architec- 
ture. 

The seven Lamps of Architecture— 

1. The Lamp of Sacrifice. 

2. The Lamp of Truth. 

6 



122 AKCHITECTUKB. 

3. The Lamp ol Power. 

4. The Lamp of Beauty. 

5. The Lamp of Life. 

6. The Lamp of Memory. 
1. The Lamp of Obedience. 

I. The Lamp or Spirit of Sacrifice prompts us to the offer- 
ihg of precious things, merely because they are precious, not 
because they are useful or necessary. Was it necessary to the 
completeness, as a type, of the Levitical sacrifice, or to its 
utility as an explanation of divine purposes, that it should 
cost anything to the person in whose behalf it was offered ? 
Costliness was generally a condition of the acceptableness 
of the sacrifice. " Neither will I offer unto the Lord my God 
of that which did cost me nothing." That costliness, there- 
fore, must be an acceptable condition in all human offermgs at 
all times ; for if it was pleasing to God once, it must please 
Him always, unless directly forbidden by Him afterwards, 
which it has never been. 

Was the glory of the tabernacle necessary to set forth or 
image His Divine glory to the minds of His people ? What ! 
purple or scarlet necessary to the people who had seen the 
great river of Egypt run scarlet to the sea, under His con- 
demnation ? What ! golden lamp and cherub necessary for 
those who had seen the fires of heaven falling like a mantle on 
Mount Smai, and its golden courts opened to receive their 
mortal lawgiver ? What ! silVer clasp and fillet necessary 
when they had seen the silver waves of the Red Sea clasp 
in their arched hollows the corpses of the horse and his rider ? 
Nay — not so. There was but one reason, and that an eternal 
one ; that as the covenant that He made mth man was accom- 
panied with some external sign of its continuance, and of His 
remembrance of it, so the acceptance of that covenant might 
be marked and signified by use, in some external sign of their 



ABT. 123 

love and obedience, and sui-render of themselves and theirs 
to His will ; and that their gratitude to Him, and contmual 
remembrance of Him, might have at once their expression and 
their enduring testimony in the presentation to Him, not only 
of the firstlings of the herd and fold, not only of the fruits of 
the earth and the tithe of time, but of all treasures of wisdom 
and beauty ; of the thought that invents, and the hand that 
labors ; of wealth of wood, and weight of stone ; of the 
strength of iron, and of the light of gold. 
>■ It has been said — it ought always to be said, for it is true — 
that a better and more honorable oifering is made to our 
Master in ministry to the poor, in extending the knowledge 
of His name, in the practice of the virtues by which that name 
is hallowed, than in material j^resents to His temple. Assu- 
redly it is so ; woe to all who think that any other kind or 
manner of offering may in any wise take the j^lace of these ! 
Do the people need place to pray, and calls to hear His word ? 
Then it is no time for smoothing pillars or carving pulpits ; 
let us have enough first of walls and roofs. Do the people 
need teaching fi-om house to house, and bread fi'om day to 
day ? Then they are deacons and ministers we want, not 
architects. I msist on this, I plead for this ; but let us 
examine ourselves, and see if this be indeed the reason for our 
backwardness in the lesser work. The question is not be- 
tween God's house and His jioor : it is not between God's 
house and His gospel. It is l^etween God's house and ours. 
Have we no tesselated colors on our floors ? no frescoed 
fancies on our roofs ? no niched statuary in our coriidors ? 
no gilded furniture in our chambers ? no costly stones in our 
cabinets ? Has even the tithe of these been offered ? They 
are, or they ought to be, the signs that enough has been 
devoted to the great purposes of human stewardship, and that 
there remains to lis what we can spend in luxury ; but there is 



124 A-ECHITECTUKE. 

a greater and prouder luxury than this selfish one- -that of 
bringing a portion of such things as these into sacred service, 
and presenting them for a memorial that our pleasure as well 
as our toil has been hallowed by the remembrance of Him 
who gave both the strength and the reward. And until this 
has been done, I do not see how such possessions can be 
retained in happiness. I do not understand the feeling which 
would arch our own gates and pave our own thresholds, and 
leave the church with its narrow door and foot-worn sill ; the 
feeling which enriches our own chambers with all manner of 
costliness, and endures the bare wall and mean compass of the 
temple. 

The tenth part of the expense which is sacrificed in domes- 
tic vanities, would, if collectively offered and wisely employed, 
build a marble church for every town in England; such a 
church as it should be a joy and a blessing even to pass near 
in our daily ways and walks, and as it would bring the light 
into the eyes to see from far, lifting its fair height above the 
purple crowd of humble roofs. 

I have said for every to\^-n : I do not want a marble church 
for every village ; nay, I do not want marble churches at all 
for their own sakes, but for the sake of the spirit that would 
build them. The church has no need of any visible splendors ; 
her power is independent of them, her puiity is in some degree 
opposed to them. The simplicity of a pastoral sanctuary is 
lovelier than the majesty of an urban temple ; and it may be 
more than questioned whether, to the people, such majesty has 
ever been the source of any increase of effective piety ; but to 
the builders it has been, and must ever be. It is not the church 
we want, but the sacrifice ; not the emotion of admiration, but 
the act of adoration ; not the gift, but the giving (St. John xii. 5). 

God never forgets any work or labor of love ; and what- 
ever it may be of which the first and best portions or powers 



THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 125 

have been presented to Him, He will multiply and increase 
sevenfold. Therefore, though it may not be necessarily the 
interest of religion to admit the service of the arts, the arts 
will never flourish till they have been primarily devoted to 
that service — devoted both by arcliitoct and employer ; by the 
one in scrupulous, earnest, aflectionate design ; by the other 
in expenditure at least more frank, at least less calculating, 
than that which he would admit in the indulgence of his own 
private feelings. 



II. ^THE LAMP OP TRUTH. 

There are some faults slight in the sight of love, some 
errors slight in the estimate of wisdom ; but Truth forgives 
no insult, and endures no stain. 

I would have the Spirit or Lamp of Truth clear in the 
hearts of our artists and handicraftsmen, not as if the truthful 
practice of handicrafts could far advance the cause of Truth, 
but because I would fain see the handicrafts themselves urged 
by the spurs of chivalry. 

We may not be able to command good, or beautiful, or 
inventive architecture, but we can command an honest archi- 
tecture: the meagreness of poverty may be pardoned, the 
sternness of utility respected; but what is there but scorn for 
the meanness of deception ? 

The worth of a diamond is simply the imderstanding of the 
time it must take to look for it before it is found, and the worth 
of an ornament is the time it must take before it can be cut. 
I suppose that hand-wrought ornament can no more be gene- 
rally kno^^'n from machine-work than a diamond can be known 
from paste. Yet exactly as a woman of feeling would not weai 



126 ARCHITECTURE. 

false jewels, so would a builder of honoi* drsdain false orna- 
ments. The using of them is just as downright and inexcu- 
sable as a lie. You use that which pretends to a worth which 
it has not ; which pretends to have cost, and to be, what it 
did not, and is not; it is an imposition, a vulgarity, an imper- 
tinence, and a sin. Nobody wants ornaments in this world, 
but everybody wants integrity. All the fair devices that ever'./ 
were fancied, are not worth a lie. ', 

This being a general law, there are, nevertheless, certaui" 
exceptions respecting particular substances and their uses,'' 
Thus in the use of brick; since that is known to :he: 
originally moulded, there is no reason why it should not be*! 
moulded into divers forms. It will never be supposed to * 
have been cut, and therefore ^vill cause no deception; it will 
have only the credit it deserves. 



ni. ^THE LAMP OF POWER. 

All building shows man either as gathering or governing ; 
and the secrets of his success are his knowing what to gather, 
and how to rule. 

There is a sympathy in the forms of noble building, with 
what is most sublime in natural things ; and it is the governing 
Power, directed by this sympathy, whose operation I shall 
endeavor to trace. 

In the edifices of Man there should be found reverent woi'- 
ship and folloTvdng, not only of the spirit which rounds the 
pillars of the forest, and arches the vault of the avenue — 
which gives veining to the leaf, and poHsh to the shell, and 
grace to every pulse that agitates animal organization, — but 
of that also which upheaves the pillars of the earth, and builda 



THE LAMP OF POWER. 12^ 

up her banen precipices into the coldness of the clouds, and 
lifts her shadowy cones of mountain purjale into tl e pale arch 
of the sky; for these, and other glories more than these, 
refuse not to connect themselves in his thoughts, with the 
work of his own hand; the grey cliff loses not its noble- 
ness when it reminds us of some Cyclopean waste of mural 
stone ; the pinnacles of the rocky promontory arrange them- 
selves, undegraded, into fantastic semblances of fortress tow- 
ers ; and even the awful cone of the far-off mountain has a 
melancholy mixed with that of its own solitude, which is 
cast from the images of nameless tumuli on white sea-shores, 
and of the heaps of reedy clay, into which chambered cities 
melt in their mortality. 

Though mere size will not ennoble a mean design, yet 
every increase of magnitude will bestow upon it a certain 
degree of nobleness ; so that it is well to determine, at first, 
whether the buUding is to be markedly beautiful, or mark- 
edly sublime. 

It has often been observed that a building, in order to show 
its magnitude, must be seen all at once. It would be better 
to say, that it must have one visible bounding Hne fi-om top 
to bottom, and from end to end. This bouudmg line from top 
to bottom may be incHned inwards, and the mass, therefore, 
pyramidal ; or vertical, and the mass form one grand cliff; or 
inclined outwards, as in the advancing fronts of old houses, and, 
in a sort, in the Greek temple, and all buildings with heavy 
cornices or heads. I am much inclined, myself, to love the 
true vertical, or the vertical with a solemn frown of pro- 
jection. 

What is needful in the setting forth of magnitude in height, 
is right also in the marking it in area, — ^let it be gathered Avell 
together. Whatever infinity of fair form there may be in the 
maze of the forest, there is a fairer in the surface of the quiet 



128 ARCHITECTURE. 

lake ; and I hardly know that association of shaft or tracery 
for which I would exchange the warm sleep of sunshine on 
some smooth, broad, human-like front of marble. Neverthe- 
less, if breadth is to be beautiful, its substance must in some 
sort be beautiful. 

Positive shade is a more necessary and more sublime thing 
in an architect's hands than in a painter's. After size and 
weight the Power of architecture may be said to depend on 
the quantity of its shadow. As the great poem and the 
great fiction generally affect us most by the majesty of their 
masses of shade, and cannot take hold upon us if they affect a 
continuance of lyric sprightliness, but must be serious often, 
and sometimes melancholy, else they do not express the truth 
of this wild world of ours ; so there must be, in this magnifi- 
cently human art of architecture, some equivalent expression 
for the trouble and wrath of life, for its sorrow and its mys- 
tery ; and this it can only give by depth or diffusion of gloom, 
by the fi-own upon its front, and the shadow of its recess. So 
that Rembrandtism is a noble manner in architecture, though 
a false one in painting ; and I do not believe that ever any 
building was truly great, unless it had mighty masses, vigo- 
rous and deep, of shadow mingled with its surface. And among 
the first habits that a young arcliitect should learn, is that ot 
thinking in shadow, not looking at a design in its miserable 
liny skeleton, but conceiving it as it will be, when the dawn 
lights it, and the dusk leaves it, when its stones will be hot. 
and its crannies cool ; when the Uzards will bask on the one, 
and the birds build in the other. Let him design with th^ 
sense of cold and heat upon him ; let him cut out the sha- 
dows, as men dig wells in unwatered plains ; and lead along 
the lights, as a founder does his hot metal ; let him keep the 
full command of both, and see that he knows how they fall 
and where they fade. 



TUE LAMP OF POWEK. 129 

Until our street architecture is bettered, until we give it 
some size and boldness, until we give our windows recess and 
our walls thickness, I know not how we can blame our archi- 
tects for their feebleness in more important works. Their 
eyes are inured to narrowness and slightness ; can we expect 
them at a word to conceive and deal with breadth and soli- 
dity ? They ought not to live in our cities ; there is that in 
their miserable walls which bricks up to death men's imagina- 
tions, as surely as ever perished forsworn men. An arcliitect 
should live as httle in cities as a painter. Send him to our 
hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a 
buttress, and what by a dome. 

We have sources of Power in the imagery of our iron 
coasts and azure hills ; of power more pure, nor less serene 
than that of the hermit spirit which once lighted with white 
lines of cloisters the glades of the Alpine pine, and raised into 
ordered spires the wild rocks of the Norman sea ; which gave 
to the temple gate the depth and darkness of Elijah's Iloreb 
cave ; and lifted, out of the populous city, grey chffs of lonely 
stone, into the midst of saiUng birds and silent air. 

Do not think you can have good architecture merely by 
paying for it ? It is only by active and sympathetic attention 
to the domestic and every-day-work which is done for each 
of you, that you can educate either yourselves to the feeling 
or your builders to the doing of what is truly great. 

Well but, you will answer, you cannot feel interested in 
Architecture : you do not care about and cannot care about it. 

You think within yourselves, " it is not right that architec- 
ture should be interesting. It is a very grand thing this archi- 
tecture, but essentially unentertaining. It is its duty to be 
dull, it is monotonous by law ; it cannot be correct and yet 
amusing." 

Believe me, it is not so. All things that are worth doing 

G* 



130 AKCHITECTUEE. 

m art, are interesting and attractive when they are done, 
There is no hiw of right which consecrates dulness. The 
proof of a thing's being right is, that it has power over the 
heart, that it excites us, wins us, or helps us. 

All good art has the capacity of pleasing^ if people will 
attend to it ; there is no law against its pleasmg ; but on the 
contrary, something wrong either in the spectator or the art 
when it ceases to please. 

" But what are we to do ? We cannot make architects of 
ourselves." Pardon me, you can — and you ought. Archi- 
tecture is an art for all men to learn, because all are con- 
cerned with it ; and it is so simple, that there is no excuse for 
not being acquainted with its primary rules, any more than 
for ignorance of grammar or spelling, which are both of them 
far more difficult sciences. 

Far less trouble than is necessary to learn how to play 
chess, or whist, or goff, tolerably, — fiir less than a schoolboy 
takes to win the meanest prize of the passing year, would 
acquaint you with all the main principles of the construction 
of a Gothic cathedral, and I believe you would hardly find 
the study less amusing. 



rv. ^THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 

The value of Architecture depends on two distinct charac- 
ters : — the one, the impression it receives from human power ; 
the other, the image it bears of the natural creation. 

It will be thought that I have somewhat hmited the 
elements of architectural beauty to imitative forms. I do not 



i 



THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 131 

mean 1 3 assert that every arrangement of line is directly sug- 
gested by a natural object ; but that all beautiful lines are adap- 
tations of those which are commonest in the external creation ; 
that in proportion to the richness of their association, the re- 
semblance to natural work, as a type and help, must be more 
closely attempted, and more clearly seen ; and that beyond a 
certain point, and that a very low one, man cannot advance in 
the invention of beauty, without directly imitating natural 
form. 

There are many forms of so called decoration in Architec- 
ture, habitual, and received therefore with approval, or at all 
events without any venture at expression of dislike, which I 
have no hesitation in asserting to be not ornament at all, but 
to be ugly things, the expense of which ought, in truth, to be 
set down in the architect's contract, as " For Monstrification." 
I believe that we regard these customary deformities with 
a savage complacency, as an Indian does his flesh'patterns anc 
paint — all nations being in certain degrees and senses savage. 

I suppose there is no conceivable form or grouping of 
forms but in some part of the ifniverse an example of it may 
be found. On the shapes which in the every-day world are 
familiar to the eyes of men, God has stamped those characters 
of beauty which He has made it man's nature to love ; while 
in certahi exceptional forms He has shown that the adoption 
of the others was not a matter of necessity, but part of the 
adjusted harmony of creation. Knowing a thing to be 
frequent, we may assume it to be beautiful ; and assume that 
which is most frequent to be most beautiful : I mean, of course, 
xdsibly frequent ; for the forms of things which are hidden in 
caverns of the earth, or in the anatomy of animal frames, are 
evidently not intended by their Maker to bear the habitual 
gaze of man. And, again, by fi'equency I mean that hmited 
and isolated frequency which is characteristic of all perfection , 



132 AECHITECTURE 

as a rose is a common flower, but yet there are not so many 
roses on the tree as there are leaves. In this respect Nature 
is sparmg of her highest, and lavish of her less beauty ; but 1 
call the flower as frequent as the leaf, because, each in ita 
allotted quantity, where the one is, there will ordinarily be 
the other. 

Architecture, in borrowing the objects of Nature, is bound 
to place them, as far as may be in her power, ia such associ- 
ations as may befit and express their origin. She is not to 
imitate directly the natural arrangement ; she is not to carve 
irregular stems of ivy up her columns to account for the leaves 
at the top, but she is nevertheless to place her most exuberant 
vegetable ornament just where Nature would have placed it, 
and to give some indication of that radical and connected 
structure which Nature would have given it. Thus, the 
Corinthian capital is beautiful, because- it expands under the 
abacus just as Nature would have expanded it ; and because it 
looks as if the leaves had one root, though that root is unseen. 
And the flamboyant leaf-mouldings are beautiful, because they 
nestle and run up the hollows, and fill the angles, and clasp 
the shafts which natural leaves would have delighted to fill 
and to clasp. They are no mere cast of natural leaves : they are 
counted, orderly, and architectural ; but they are naturally, 
and therefore beautifully placed. 

What is the right place for architectural ornament ? What 
is the peculiar treatment of ornament which renders it archi- 
tectural ? 

Suppose that in time of serious occupation, of stern business, 
a companion should repeat in our ears, continually, some 
fevorite passage of poetry, over and over again all day long. 
We should not only soon be utterly sick and weary of the 
souud of it, but that sound would, at the end of the day, 
have so sunk into the habit of the ear that the entire meaning 



THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 133 

ot the passage would be dead to us, and it would ever thence- 
forward reqiure some effort to fix and recover it. The music 
of it would not meanwhile have aided the business in hand, 
while its own delightfulness would thenceforward be in a mea- 
sure destroyed. It is the same with every other form of 
definite thought. If you violently press its expression to the 
senses, at times when the mind is otherwise engaged, that 
expression will be ineffective at the time, and will have its 
sharpness and clearness destroyed for ever. 

Aj^ply this to expressions of thought received by the eye. 
Remember that the eye is at your mercy more than the ear. 
" The eye it cannot choose but see." Now, if you j^resent 
lovely forms to it when it cannot call the mind to help it in 
its work, and among objects of vulgar use and unhappy 
position, you will neither please the eye nor elevate the 
vulgar object. But you will fill and weary the eye with the 
beautiful form. It will never be of much use to 3'ou any more 
— its freshness and purity are gone. 

Hence then a general law, of singular importance in the 
present day, a law of common sense — not to decorate things 
belonging to purposes of active and occupied life. Wher- 
ever you can rest, there decorate ; where rest is forbidden, so 
is beauty. You must not mix ornament with business, any 
more than you may mix play. Work first, and then rest. 
Work first, and then gaze, but do not use golden ploughshares, 
nor bind ledgers in enamel. Do not thrash with sculptured 
flails ; nor put bas-reliefs on millstones. 

The most familiar position of Greek moulduigs is in these 
days on shop-fronts — ornaments which were invented to adorn 
temples and beautify kings' palaces. There is not the small- 
est advantage in them where they are. Absolutely valueless 
— utterly without the power of giving pleasure, they only 
satiate the eye, and vulgarise their own forms. It is curious. 



134 ARCHITECTURE. 

and it says little foi our national probity on the one hand, or 
prudence on the other, to see the whole system of our street 
decoration based on the idea that people' must be baited to a 
shop as moths are to a candle. 

Must not beauty, then, it will be asked, be sought for in the 
forms which we associate with our every-day life ? Yes, if you 
do it consistently, and in places where it can be calmly seen 
Put it in the drawing-room, not into the workshop ; put it upon 
domestic furniture, not upon tools of handicraft. All men 
have sense of what is right in this manner, if they would only 
use and apply that sense. 

There is no subject of street ornament so wisely chosen as 
the fountain, where it is a fountain of iise ; for it is just there 
that perhaps the happiest pause takes place in the labor of the 
day, when the pitcher is rested on the edge of it, and the 
breath of the bearer is drawn deeply, and the hair swept from 
the forehead, and the uprightness of the form declined against 
the marble ledge, and the sound of the kind word or light 
laugh mixes with the trickling of the falling water, heard 
shriller and shriller as the pitcher fills. What pause is so sweet 
as that — so full of the depth of ancient days, so softened with 
the calm of pastoral solitude ? 

Proportion and Abstraction are the two especial marks 
of architectural design as distinguished from all other. 

Proportions are as infinite as possible airs in music ; and it 
is just as rational an attempt to teach a young architect how 
to proportion truly and well by calculating for him the pro- 
portions of fine works, as it would be to teach him to com- 
pose melodies by calculating the mathematical relations of the 
notes in Beethoven's Adelaide or Mozart's Requiem. The 
man who has eye and intellect will invent beautiful pro- 
portions, and cannot help it ; but he can no more tell us how 
to do it than Wordsworth could tell us how to write 



THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 135 

a sonnet, or than Scott could have told us how to plan a 
romance. 

There is no proportion between equal things; they can 
have symmetry only, and symmetry without proportion is not 
composition. To compose is to arrange unequal things, and 
the first thing to be done in beginning a composition is to 
determine which is to be the piincipal thing. " Have one 
large thing and several smaller things, or one principal thing 
and several inferior things, and bind them well together." 

Proportion is between three terms at least. 

All art is abstract in its beginnings ; that is to say, it ex- 
presses only a small number of the qualities of the thing 
represented. 

The form of a tree on the Ninevite sculptures is much like 
that which, some twenty years ago, was familiar upon sam- 
plers. There is a resemblance between the work of a great 
nation, in this phase, and the work of childhood and ignorance. 

In the next stage of art there is a condition of strength, in 
which the abstraction which was begun in incapability is con- 
tinued in free will. 

" Greater completion marks the progress of art, absolute 
completion usually its decline." 

It is well that the young architect should be taught to think 
of imitative ornament as of the extreme grace of language ; 
not to be regarded at first, not to be obtained at the cost of 
purpose, meaning, force, or conciseness, yet, indeed, a per- 
fection — the least of all perfections, and yet the crowning one 
of all, — one, which by itself, and regarded in itself, is an 
architectural coxcombry, but yet is the sign of the most 
highly-trained mind and power when it is associated with 
others. It is a safe manner to design all things at first in 
severe abstraction, and to be prepared, if need were, to carry 



136 AECHITECTOKE. 

them out in that form ; then to mark the j)arts where high 
finish would he admissible. 

I think the colors of architecture should be those of natural 
stones, partly because more durable, but also because more 
perfect and graceful. 

I do not feel able to speak with any confidence respecting 
the touching of sculpture with color. I would only note one 
point, that sculpture is the representation of an idea, while 
architecture is itself a real thing. The idea may, as I think, 
be left colorless, and colored by the beholder's mind ; but a 
reality ought to have reality in all its attributes ; its color 
should be as fixed as its form. 

The following list of noble characteristics occurs more 
or less in different buildings, some in one and some in 
another : — 

1. Projection towards the top. 2. Breadth of flat surface. 
3. Square compartments of that surface. 4. Varied and visi- 
ble masonry. 5. Vigorous depth of shadow, exhibited espe- 
cially by pierced traceries. 6. Varied proportion in ascent. 
7. Lateral symmetry. 8. Sculpture most delicate at the base. 
9. Enriched quantity of ornament at the top. 10. Sculpture 
abstract in inferior ornaments and mouldings, complete in 
animal forms, both to be executed in white marble. 11. 
Vivid color introduced in flat geometrical patterns, and 
obtained by the use of naturally colored stones. 

These characteristics all together, and in their highest pos- 
sible relative degrees, exist, as far as I know, only in one build- 
ing in the world, the Campanile of Giotto at Florence. I 
remember well how, when a boy, I used to despise that Cam- 
panile, and think it meanly smooth and finished. But I have 
since lived beside it many a day, and looked out upon it from 
my windows by sun-light and moonlight, and I shall not soon 
forget how profound and gloomy appeared to me the savage- 



THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. IS? 

n.ess of the Northern Gothic, when I afterwards stood, 
for the first time, beneath the front of Salisbury Cathe^ 
dral. 

The contrast is indeed strange, if it could be quickly felt, be- 
tween the rising of those grey walls out of their quiet swarded 
space, like dark and barren rocks out of a green lake, with 
their rude, mouldering, rough-grained shafts, and trij^le lights, 
without tracery or other ornament than the martins' nests in 
the height of them, and that bright, smooth, sunny surface of 
glowing jasper, those spiral shafts and fairy traceries, so 
white, so famt, so crystalline, that theii' shgh't shapes are 
hardly traced in darkness on the pallor of the Eastern sky, 
that serene height of mountain alabaster, colored like a 
morning cloud, and chased like a sea-shell. And if this be, 
as I believe it, the model and mirror of perfect architecture, is 
there not something to be learned by looking back to the 
early life of him who raised it ? 

I said that the Power of the human mind had its gro^vi:!! in 
the Wilderness ; much more must the love and the conception 
of that beauty, whose every line and hue we have seen to be, 
at the best, a faded image of God's daily work, and an arrested 
ray of some star of creation, be given chiefly in the places 
which he has gladdened by planting there the fir tree and the 
pine, Not within the walls of Florence, but among the far- 
away fields of her lilies, was the child trained who was to raise 
that headstone of Beauty above the towers of Avatch and war. 
Remember all that he became ; count the sacred thoughts 
wdth which he filled the heart of Italy ; ask those who followed 
him what they learned at his feet ; and when you have num- 
bered his labors, and received their testimony, if it seem to 
you that God had verily poured out ujDon this His servant no 
common nor restrained portion of His Spirit, and that he was 
indeed a king among the children of men, remember also that 



138 AECHITECTCEE. 

the legend upon his crown was that of David's •— ' I took 
thee from the sheepcote, and from following the sheep." 



V. — ^THE LAMP OF LIFE. 

The creations of Architecture, being not essentially com* 
posed of things pleasant in themselves, as music of sweet 
sounds, or painting of fair colors, but of inert substance, 
depend for their dignity and pleasurableness, in the utmost 
degree, upon the vivid expression of the intellectual life 
which has been concerned in their production. 

It is no sign of deadness in a present art that it borrows or 
imitates, but only if it borrows without paying interest, or if 
it imitates without choice. The art of a great nation, which 
is developed without any acquaintance with nobler examples 
than its own early efforts furnish, exhibits always the most 
consistent and comprehensible growth, and perhaps is re- 
garded usually as peculiarly venerable in its self-origination. 
But there is something to my mind more majestic yet in the 
life of an architecture like that of the Lombards, rude and 
infantine in itself, and surrounded by fragments of a nobler 
art of which it is quick in admiration, and ready in imitation, 
and yet so strong in its own new instincts that it re-constructs 
and re-arranges every fragment that it copies or borrows into 
harmony with its own thoughts, — a harmony at first disjointed 
and awkward, but completed in the end, and fused into per- 
fect organization ; all the borrowed elements being subordi- 
nated to its own primal, unchanged life. 

Two very distinguishmg characters of vital imitation are, 
its Frankness and its Audacity; its Frankness is especially 



THE LAMP OF LIFE. 139 

singular ; there is never any effort to conceal the degree of 
the sources of its borrowing. Raffaelle carries off a whole 
figure from Masaccio, or borrows an entire composition 
fi'om Perugino, with as much tranquillity and simplicity 
of innocence as a young Spartan pickpocket ; and the 
architect of a Komanesque basUica gathered his columns 
and his caj)itals where he could find them, as an ant picks 
up sticks. 

Frankness, however, is in itself no excuse for repetition, nor 
Audacity for innovation, when the one is indolent and the 
other unwise. 

I believe the right question to ask, respecting aU ornament, 
is simply this : Was it done with enjoyment — was the carver 
happy while he was about it ? It may be the hardest work 
possible, and the harder because so much pleasure was taken 
in it ; but it must have been happy too or it will not be living. 

We have certain work to do for our bread, and that is to 
be done strenuously ; other work to do for our delight, and 
that is to be done heartily ; neither is to be done by halves or 
shifts, but with a will ; and what is not worth this effort is not 
to be done at all. There is dreaming enough, and earthiness 
enough, and sensuality enough in human existence, without 
our turning the few glowing moments of it into mechanism ; 
and since our life must at the best be but a vapor that appears 
but for a little time and then vanishes away, let it at least 
appear as a cloud in the height of Heaven, not as the thick 
darkness that broods over the blast of the Furnace, and rollmg 
of the Wheel. 



140 AECHITECTUEE. 



VI. — THE LAMP OF MEMORY. 



As the centralisation and protectress of Memory and Asso. 
ciation, Arcliitecture is to be regarded by us with the most 
serious thought. We may live without her, and worship with, 
out her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is 
all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which 
the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears ! 
How many pages of doubtful record might we not often 
spare, for a few stones left one upon another ? The ambition 
of the old Babel-builders was well directed for this world. 
There are but two strong conquerors of the foi-getfulness of 
men. Poetry and Architecture ; and the latter in some sort 
includes the former, and is mightier in its reaUty. It is well 
to have, not only what men have thought and felt, but what 
their hands have handled and their strength wrought, and 
theii" eyes beheld, all the days of their Hfe. The age of Homer 
is surrounded with darkness, his very personality with doubt. 
Not so that of Pericles ; and the day is coming when we shall 
confess we have learned more of Greece out of the crumbled 
fragments of her sculpture than even from her sweet singers 
or soldier historians. And if indeed there be any profit in 
our knowledge of the past, or any joy in the thought of being 
remembered hereafter, which can give strength to present 
exertion, or patience to present endurance, there are two 
duties resj^ecting national Architecture whose importance it is 
impossible to overrate ; the first to render the Architecture 
of the day historical ; and the second, to preserve, as the most 
jDrecious of inheritances, that of past ages. It is in becoming 
memorial or monumental that a true perfection is attained by 
civil and domestic buildings. 

As regards domestic buildings, there must always be a cer 



THE LAMP OF MEMORY. 141 

tain limitation to views of this kind in the powei* as well as in 
the hearts of men ; still I cannot but think it an evil sign of a 
people when their houses are buUt to last but one generation 
only. There is a sanctity in a good man's house which cannot 
be renewed in every tenement that rises on its ruins ; and I 
believe that good men would generally feel this ; and that 
having spent then- lives happily and honorably, they would be 
grieved at the close of them to think that the j)lace of their 
earthly abode, which had seen, and seemed almost to sympa- 
thise in all their honor, their gladness, or their suffering, — 
that this, with all the record it bare of them, and all of mate- 
rial things that they had loved and ruled over, and set the 
stamp of themselves upon, was to be swept away, as soon as 
there was room for them made in the grave ; that no respect 
was to be shown to it, no affection felt for it, no good to be 
drawn from it by their children ; that though there was a 
monument in the church, there was no warm monument in 
the hearth and house to them ; that all that they ever trea- 
sured was despised, and the places that had sheltered them 
were dragged down to the dust. I say that a good man 
would fear this ; and that, far more, a good son, a noble 
descendant, would fear doing it to his father's house. If men 
lived like men indeed, their houses would be temples — which 
we should hardly dare to injure, and in which it would make 
us holy to be permitted to live ; and there mitst be a strange 
dissolution of natural affection, a strange unthankfulness for 
all that homes have given and parents taught, a strange con- 
sciousness that we have been unfaithful to our fathers' honor, 
or that our own lives are not such as would make our dwell- 
ings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build 
to himself, and buUd for the little revolution of his own life 
only. 

When men do not love their hearths, nor reverence their 



142 AKCUITECTUKE. 

thresholds, it is a sign that they have dishonored both. Our 
God is a household God, as well as a heavenly one ; He haa 
an altar in every man's dwelling ; let men look to it when the) 
rend it lightly, and pour out its ashes. 

It would be better if, in every possible instance, men built 
their own houses on a scale commensurate rather with their 
condition at the commencement, than their attainments at the 
termination of their worldly career ; and built them to stand 
as long as human work, at its strongest, can be hoped to stand, 
recording to their children what they have been, and from 
what, if so it had been permitted them, they had risen, 

I would have, then, our ordinary dwelHug-houses huilt to 
last, and built to be lovely ; as rich and full of jDleasantness as 
may be, within and without, and with such differences as 
might suit and express each man's character and occupation, 
and partly his history. 

In public buildings the historical purpose should be still 
more definite. Better the rudest work that tells a story or 
records a fact, than the richest without meaning. There 
should not be a single ornament put upon great civic build- 
ings, without some intellectual intention. It is one of the 
advantages of gothic architecture, that it admits of a rich- 
ness of record altogether unlimited. 

Every human action gains in honor, in grace, in all true 
magnificence, by its regard to things that are to come. It 
is the far sight, the quiet and confident patience, that, 
above all other attributes, separate man from man, and near 
him to his Maker; and there is no action nor art, whose 
majesty w^e may not measure by this test. Therefore, when 
w^e build, let us think that we build (public edifices) for ever. 
Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone ; 
let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and 
let us think, as we lav stone on stone, that a tune is to come 



THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE. 143 

when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have 
touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the 
labor and wrought substance of them, " See ! this our fathers 
did for us." For, indeed, the greatest glory of a buUding is 
not in its stones, or in its gold. Its glory is in its age^ and 
in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mys- 
terious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, 
which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the 
passing waves of humanity. 



VII. — ^THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE. 

It has been my endeavor to show how every form of noble 
architecture is in some sort the embodiment of the Polity, 
Life, History, and Religious Faith of nations. Once or twice 
ill doing this, I have named a principle to which I would now 
assign a definite place among those which direct that embodi- 
ment ; — the crowning grace of all the rest : that principle to 
which PoUty owes its stability. Life its happiness. Faith its 
acceptance. Creation its continuance, — Obedience. 

How false is the conception, how fi'antic the pursuit, of 
that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty ! There is 
no such thing in the universe. There can never be. The 
stars have it not ; the earth has it not ; the sea has it not ; and 
we men have the mockery and semblance of it only for our 
heaviest punishment. 

The enthusiast would reply that by Liberty he meant the 
Law of Liberty. Then why use the single and misimderstood 
word ? If by liberty you mean chastisement of the passions, 



144 ARCHITECTURE. 

discipline of the intellect, subjection of the will; if you mean 
the feai* of inflicting, the shame of committing a wrong ; if you 
mean respect for all who are in authority, and consideration 
for all who are in dependence ; veneration for the good, mercy 
to the evil, sympathy with the weak; — if you mean, in 
a word, that Service which is defined in the liturgy of the 
EngUsh church to be " perfect Freedom," why do you name 
this by the same word by which the luxurious mean license, 
and the reckless mean change ; — by which the rogue means 
rapine, and the fool, equaUty ; by which the proud mean anar- 
chy, and the malignant mean violence ? Call it by any name 
rather than this, but its best and truest test is, Obedience. 

Obedience is, indeed, founded on a kind of freedom, else it 
would become mere suhj ligation^ but that freedom is only 
granted that obedience may be more perfect. 

If there be any one condition which, in watching the pro- 
gress of Arcliitecture, we see distinct and general, it is this ; 
that the architecture of a nation is great only when it is as 
universal and as established as its language ; and when pro- 
vincial differences of style are nothing more than so many 
dialects. Other necessities are matters of doubt: nations 
have been alike successful in their architecture in times of 
poverty and of wealth ; in times of war and of peace ; in times 
of barbarism and of refinement ; under governments the most 
liberal or the most arbitrary ; but this one condition has been 
constant, this one requirement clear in all places and at all 
times, that the work shall be that of a school, that no indivi- 
dual caprice shall dispense with, or materially vary, accepted 
types and customary decorations ; and that from the cottage 
to the palace, and from the chapel to the basilica, and from 
the garden fence to the fortress wall, every member and 
feature of the architecture of the nation shall be as commonly 
current, as frankly accepted, as its language or its coin. 



THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE. 145 

A day never passes Avithout our hearing our English archi- 
tects called upon to be original, and to invent a new style: 
About as sensible and necessary an exhortation as to ask a man 
who has never had rags on his back to keep out cold, to invent 
a new mode of cutting a coat. Give him a whole coat first, 
and let him concern himself about the fashion of it afterwards. 
"We want no neio style of architecture. Who wants a new style 
of painting or sculpture ? But we want some style. It is of 
marvellously little importance, if we have a code of laws and 
they be good laws, whether they be new or old, foreign or 
native, Roman or Saxon, or Norman or English laws. But 
it is of considerable impoi'tance that Ave should have a code 
of laws of one kind or another, and that code accejited and 
enforced from one side of the island to the other, and not one 
law made ground of judgment at York and another at 
Exeter. 

There seems to me to be a wonderful misunderstanding 
among the majority of architects at the present day, as to the 
v^ry nature and meaning of Origmality, and of all wherein it 
consists. Originality in expression does not depend on inven- 
tion of new words ; nor originahty in poetry on invention of 
new measures ; nor, in painting, on invention of new colors, or 
new modes of using them. The chords of music, the harmonies 
of color, the general principles of the arrangement of sculptural ' 
masses, have been determined long ago, and, in all probability, 
cannot be added to any more than they can be altered. 

A man who has the gift, will take up any style that is going, 
the style of his day, and will work in that, and be great in 
that, and make everything that he does in it look as fresh as 
if every thought of it had just come down from heaven. I do 
not say that he will not take liberties with his materials, or 
\Aith his rules. I do not say that strange changes will not 
sometimes be wrought by his efforts, or his fancies, in both. 

7 



146 AECniTECTURE. 

But those changes "w^ill be instructive, natural, facile, though 
sometimes marvellous ; and those liberties will be like the 
liberties that a great speaker takes with the language, not a 
defiance of its rules for the sake of singularity, but inevitable, 
uncalculated, and brilliant consequences of an effort to express 
what the language, without such infraction, could not. 

I know too well the undue importance which the study that 
every man follows must assume in his own eyes, to trust my 
own impressions of the dignity of that of Architecture ; and 
yet I think I cannot be utterly mistaken in regai'ding it as at 
least useful m the sense of a National employment. I am con- 
firmed in this impression by what I see passing among tlie 
states of Europe at this instant. All the horror, distress, and 
tumult which oppress the foreign nations, are traceable, 
among the other secondary causes through which God is 
working out His wall upon them, to the simple one of their not 
having enough to do. I am not blind to the distress among 
their operatives ; nor do I deny the nearer and visibly active 
causes of the movement : the recklessness of villany in the 
leaders of revolt, the absence of common moral principle 
in the upper classes, and of common courage and honesty in 
the heads of governments. But these causes are ultimately 
traceable to a deeper and simpler one; the recklessness of the 
demagogue, the immorality of the middle class, and the effemi- 
nacy and treachery of the noble, are traceable in all these 
nations to the commonest and most fruitful cause of calamity 
in households — Idleness. 

We think too much in our benevolent efforts, more multi- 
plied and more vain day by day, of bettering men by giving 
them advice and instruction. There are few who will take 
either ; the chief thing they need is occupation. I do not 
mean work in the sense of bread — I mean work in the sense 
oi mental interest ; for those who either are placed above the 



THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE. 14V 

necessity of labor for their bread, or who will not work 
although they should. 

There are multitudes of idle semi-gentlemen who ought to 
be shoemakers and carpenters. It is of no use to tell them 
they are fools, and that they will only make themselves misera- 
ble in the end as well as others ; if they have nothing else to 
do, they will do mischief; and the man who will not work, and 
has no means of intellectual pleasure, is as sure to become all 
instrument of evil as if he had sold himself bodily to Satan. ■ 

It would be wise to consider whether the forms of employ- 
ment which we chiefly adopt • or promote, are as well calcu- 
lated as they might be to improve and elevate us. 

I have paused, not once nor twice, as I wrote, and often 
have checked the course of what might otherwise have been 
importunate persuasion, as the thought has crossed me, how 
soon all Architecture may be vain, excej)t that which is " not 
made with hands." 

All European architecture, bad and good, old and new, is 
derived from Greece through Rome, and colored and per- 
fected from the East. The history of Architecture is nothmg 
but the tracing of the various modes and directions of this 
derivation. The Doric and the Corinthian orders are the 
roots, the one of aU Romanesque, massy-capitaled buildings — 
Norman, Lombard, Byzantine, and what else you can name 
of the kind ; and the Corinthian of all Gothic, early-EngUsh, 
French, German, and Tuscan. Now observe : those old Greeks 
gave the shaft : Rome gave the arch ; the Arabs pointed and 
foliated the arch. The shaft and arch, the frame-work and 
strength of architecture, are from the race of Japheth : the 
spirituality and sanctity of it from Ismael, Abraham, and Shem. 

I have said that the two orders, Doric and Corinthian, are 
the roots of all European architecture. You have, pei'haps, 



148 ARCHITECTUEE. 

heard of five orders : but tliere are only two real orders ; and 
there never can be any more till doomsday. On one of these 
orders the ornament is convex : those are Doric, Norman, and 
what else you recollect of the kind. On the other the orna- 
ment is concave ; those are Corinthian, Early English, Deco- 
rated, and what else yon recollect of that hind. 

The work of the Lombard was to give hardihood and sys- 
tem to the enervated body and enfeebled mind of Chi'istendom ; 
that of the Arab Avas to punish idolatry, and to proclaim the 
spirituality of worship. The Lombard covered every church 
which he built with the sculptured representations of bodily 
exercises — hunting and war. The Arab banished all imagina- 
tion of creature form from his temples, and proclaimed from their 
minarets, "There is no god but God," Opf)osite in their cha- 
racter^ and mission, alike in their magnificence of energy, they 
came from the North and from the South, the glacier torrent and 
the lava stream ; they met and contended over the wreck of the 
Roman empire ; and the very centre of the struggle, the point 
of pause of both, the deadwater of the opposite eddies, charged 
with embayed fragments of the Roman wreck, is Venice. 

The Ducal Palace of Venice contains the three elements in 
exactly equal proportions — the Roman, Lombard, and Arab. 
It is the central building of the world. 

Now Venice, as she was once the most religious, was in her 
fall the most corrupt, of European states; and as she was in her 
strength the centre of the pure currents of Christian architec- 
ture, so she is in her decline the source of the Renaissance. 

Come, then, if truths such as these are worth our thoughts; 
come, and let us know, before we enter the streets of the Sea 
City, whether we are indeed to submit ourselves to their un- 
distinguished enchantment, and to look upon the last changes 
which were Avrought on the lifted forms of her palaces, as we 
should on the capricious towering of summer clouds in the 



THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE. It 9 

sunset, ere they sank into the deep of night ; or whether, 
rather, we shall not behold in the brightness of their accumu- 
lated marble, pages on which the sentence of her luxury was 
to be written until the waves should efiace it, as they fulfilled 
— " God has numbered thy kingdom, and finished it." 

Since the first dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, 
three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon 
its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England. Of the 
first of these great powers only the memory remains ; of the 
second, the ruin ; the third, which inherits their greatness, if 
it forget their example, may be led through prouder eminence 
to less pitied destruction. 

The exaltation, the sin, and the punishment of Tp'e, have 
been recorded for us, in perhaps the most touching words 
ever uttered by the Prophets of Israel against the cities of the 
stranger. But we read them as a lovely song ; and close our 
ears to the sternness of their warning ; for the very depth of 
the fall of Tyre has blinded us to its reality, and we forget, as 
we watch the bleaching of the rocks between the sunshine and 
the sea, that they were once " as in Eden, the garden of God." 

Her successor, like her in perfection of beauty, though less 
in endurance of dominion, is still left for our beholding in the 
final period of her declme : a ghost upon the sands of the sea, 
so weak — so quiet, — so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we 
might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the 
mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and which the Sha- 
dow. A warning seems to me to be uttered by every one of 
the fast-gaining waves, that beat like passing bells against 
the stones of Venice. 

The state of Venice existed thirteen hundred and seventy- 
six years. Of this period two hundred and seventy-six years 
were passed in a nominal subjection to the cities of old 



1 50 ARCHITECTURE. 

Venetia, and in an agitated form of democracy. For six hun 
dred years, during which the power of Venice was continually 
on the increase, her government was an elective monarchy, 
her king or Doge possessing, in early times at least, as much 
independent authority as any other European sovereign ; but 
an authority gradually subjected to limitation, and shortened 
almost daily of its prerogatives, while it increased in a spectral 
and incapable magnificence. The final government of the 
nobles, under the image of a king, lasted for five hundred 
years, during which Venice reaped the fruits of her former 
energies, consumed them, — and expired. 

Throughout her career, the victories of Venice, and at many 
periods of it, her safety, were purchased by individual heroism ; 
and the man who exalted or saved her was sometimes her 
king, sometimes a noble, sometimes a citizen. 

The most curious phenomenon in all Venetian history, is 
the vitality of reUgion in private life, and its deadness in public 
policy. Amidst the enthusiasm, chivalry, or fanaticism of the 
other states of Europe, Venice stands, from first to last, like 
a masked statue ; her coldness impenetrable, her exertion only 
aroused by the touch of a secret spring. That spring was her 
cominercial interest^ — this the one motive of all her important 
political acts, or enduring national animosities. She could 
forgive insults to her honor, but never rivalship in her com- 
merce. She calculated the glory of her conquests by their 
value, and estimated their justice by their facility. 

There are, therefore, two strange and solemn lights in 
which we have to regard almost every scene in the fitful 
history of the Rivo Alto. We find, on the one hand, a deep 
and constant tone of individual religion characterizing the 
lives of the citizens of Venice in her greatness ; we find this 
spirit influencing them in all the familiar and immediate con- 
cerns of life, giving a peculiar dignity to the conduct even of 



THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE. 151 

their commercial transactions, and confessed by them with a 
simplicity of faith that may weU put to shame the hesitation 
with which a man of the world at present admits (even if it be 
so in reality,) that religious feeling has any influence over the 
minor branches of his conduct. With the fulness of this spirit 
the prosperity of the state is exactly correspondent, and with 
its failure her decline. 

There is another most interesting feature in the policy of 
Venice, namely, the magnificent and successful struggle which 
she maintained against the temporal authority of the Church 
of Rome. 

One more circumstance remains to be noted respecting the 
Venetian government, the singular unity of the families com- 
posing it, — unity far from sincere or perfect, but still admirable 
when contrasted with the fiery feuds, the almost daily revolu- 
tions, which fill the annals of the other states of Italy. Venice 
may well call upon us to note \sdth reverence, that of all the 
towers which are still seen rising, like a branchless forest, from 
her islands, there is but one whose ofiice was other than that 
of summoning to prayer, and that one was a watchtower only. 

The Venice of Modern fiction and drama is a thing of yes- 
terday, a mere efflorescence of decay, a stage-dream which 
the first ray of daylight must dissipate into dust. No pri- 
soner, whose name is worth remembering, or whose sor- 
row deserved sjonpathy, ever crossed that " Bridge of 
Sighs," which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice ; 
no great Merchant of Venice ever saw that Rialto under 
which the traveller now passes with breathless interest : the 
statue, which Byron makes Faliero address as one of his great 
ancestors, was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and 
fifty years after Fahero's death ; and the most conspicuous 
parts of the city have been so entirely altered in the course 



152 AECHITECTUKE. 

of the last three centuries, that if Henry Dandolo or Frar. cis 
Foscari could be summoned from their tombs, and stood each 
on the deck of his galley, at the entrance of the Grand Canal, 
that renowned entrance, the painter's favorite subject, the 
novelist's favorite scene, where the water first narrows by the 
steps of the church of La Salute — the mighty Doges would 
not know in what spot of the world they stood, would hte- 
rally not recognise one stone of the great city, for whose sake 
and by whose ingratitude their grey hairs had been brought 
down with bitterness to the grave. The remains of their 
Venice he hidden behind the cumbrous masses which were 
the delight of the nation in its dotage ; hidden in many a 
grass-grown court, and silent pathway, and lightless canal, 
where the slow waves have sapped their foundations for five 
hundred years, and must soon prevail over them for ever. It 
must be our task to glean and gather them forth, and restore - 
out of them some faint image of the lost city ; more gorgeous 
a thousand fold, than that which now exists, yet not created 
in the day-dream of the prince, nor by the ostentation of the 
noble, but built by iron hands and patient heai-ts, contending 
against the adversity of nature and the fury of man, so that 
its wonderfulness cannot be grasped by the indolence of 
imagination, but only after frank inquiry into the true nature 
of that wild and solitary scene, whose restless tide and trem- 
bling sands did, indeed, shelter the birth of the city, but long 
denied her dominion. 

It is enough for us to know that from the mouths of the 
Adige to those of the Piave there stretches, at a variable dis- 
tance of from three to five miles from the actual shore, a bank 
of sand, divided into long islands by narrow channels of sea. 
The space between this bank and the true shore consists of the 
sedimentary deposits from these and other rivers, a great plain 
of calcareous mud, covered, in the neighborhood of Venice, 



THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE. 153 

{fcy the sea at high water, to the dejith in most places of a foot 
eg' afoot and a half, and nearly everywhere exposed at low 
tide, but divided by an intricate network of narrow and 
winding channels, from which the sea never retires. In some 
places, according to the run of the currents, the land has risen 
into marshy islets, consolidated, some by art and some by 
time, into ground firm enough to be built upon, or fruitful 
enough to be cultivated ; m others, on the contrary, it has not 
reached the sea level ; so that, at the average low water, shal- 
low lakelets glitter among its irregularly-exposed fields of sea- 
weed. In the midst of the largest of these, increased in 
importance by the confluence of several large river channels 
towards one of the openings in the sea bank, the city of 
Venice itself is built, on a crowded cluster of islands. 

If, two thousand yeai's ago, we had been permitted to see 
the slow settling of the slime of those turbid waters into the 
j)olluted sea, and the gaining upon its deep and fresh waters 
of the lifeless, impassable, unvoyageable plain, how little could 
we have understood the purpose with which those islands were 
shaped out of the void, and the torpid waters enclosed mth 
then- desolate walls of sand ! How little could we have kno^^-n, 
any more than of what now seems to us most distressful, dark, 
and objectless, the glorious aim which was then in the mind 
of Him in whose hand are all the corners of the earth ! how 
little imagined that in the laws which were stretching forth 
the gloomy mi;d of those fruitless banks, and feeding tlie 
bitter grass among their shallows, there was indeed a prepa- 
ration, and the only preparation possible^ for the founding of 
a city which M'as to be set like a golden clasp on the girdle of 
the earth, to write her history on the white scrolls of the sea- 
surges, and to word it in their thunder, and to gather and give 
forth, in the world-wide pulsation, the glory of the West and of 
the East, from the burning heart of her Fortitude and Splendor. 



151 ABCUITECTURE. 

The vast town of St. Mark seems to lift itself visibly fc rth 
from the level field of chequered stones ; and, on each side, 
the countless arches prolong themselves into ranged symmetry, 
as if the rugged and irregular houses that pressed together 
above us in the dark alley had been struck back into sudden 
obedience and lovely order, and all their rude casements and 
broken walls had been transformed into arches charged with 
goodly sculpture, and fluted shafts of delicate stone. 

And well may they fall back, for beyond those troops of 
ordered arches there rises a vision out of the earth, and all 
the great square seems to have opened from it in a kind of 
awe, that we may see it far away ; — a multitude of pillars and 
white domes, clustered into a long low pyramid of colored 
light ; a treasure-heap, it seems, partly of gold, and partly of 
ojDal, and mother-of-pear!, hollowed beneath into five great 
vaulted porches, ceiled with fair mosaic, and beset with 
sculpture of alabaster, clear as amber and delicate as ivory, — 
sculpture fantastic and involved, of palm leaves and lilies, and 
grapes and pomegranates, and birds clingmg and fluttering 
among the branches, all twined together into an endless net- 
W' ork of buds and plumes ; and, in the midst of it, the solemn 
form of angels, sculptured, and robed to the feet, and leaning 
to each other across the gates, their figures indistinct among 
the gleaming of the golden ground through the leaves beside 
them, interrupted and dim, like the morning liglit as it faded 
among the branches of Eden, when first its gates were angel- 
guarded long ago. And round the walls of the porches there 
are set pillars of variS^ated stones, jasper and porphyry, and 
deep-green serpentine spotted with flakes of snow, and mar- 
bles, that half refuse and half yield to the sunshine, Cleopa^ 
tra-like, " their bluest veins to kiss" — the shadow, as it steals 
back from them, revealing line after line of azure undulation, 
as a receding tide leaves the Avaved sand ; their capitals rich 



THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE. 155 

with interwoven tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and drift- 
ing leaves of acanthus and vine, and mystical signs, all begin- 
ning and ending in the Cross ; and above them, in the broad 
archivolts, a continuous chain of language and of life — angels, 
and the signs of heaven, and the labors of men, each in its 
appointed season upon the earth ; and above these^ another 
range of glittering pinnacles, mixed with white arches edged 
with scarlet flowers, — a confusion of delight, amidst which the 
breasts of the Greek horses are seen blazing in their breadth 
of golden strength, and the St. Mark's Lion, lifted on a blue 
field covered with stars, until at last, as if in ecstasy, the 
crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss them- 
selves far into the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured 
spi-ay, as if the breakers on the Lido shore had been frost- 
bound before t^ey fell, and the sea nymphs had inlaid them 
with coral and amethyst. 

Between that grim cathedral of England and this, what an 
interval ! There is a type of it in the very birds that haunt 
them ; for, instead of the restless crowd, hoarse-voiced and 
sable-winged, drifting on the black upper air, the St. Mark's 
porches are full of doves, that nestle among the marble 
foliage, and mingle the soft iridescence of their lining plumes, 
changing at every motion, with the tints, hardly less lovely, 
that have stood unchanged for seven hundred years. 

And what effect has this splendor on those who pass beneath 
it ? You may walk from sunrise to sunset, to and fro, before 
the gateway of St. Mark's, and you -n-ill not see an eye lifted 
to it, nor a countenance brightened by^^ Priest and layman, 
soldier and civilian, rich and poor, pass by it alike regardless. 
tip to the very recesses of the porches, the meanest trades- 
men of the city push their counters ; nay, the foundations of 
its pillars are themselves the seats — ^not " of them that sell 
doves" for sacrifice, but of the vendors of toys and caricatures. 



156 AKCUITECTDIIE. 

Round the whole square in front of the church, there is 
almost a continuous line of cafes, where the idle Venetians of 
the middle classes lounge, and read empty journals ; in its 
centre the Austrian bands play during the time of vespers, their 
martial music jan'ing with the organ notes, — the march drown- 
ing the miserere, and the suUen crowd thickening around them 
— a crowd, which, if it had its will, would stiletto every soldier 
that pipes to it. And in the recesses of the porches, all day 
long, knots of men of the lowest classes, unemployed and 
listless, lie basking in the sun like lizards; and unregarded 
children — every heavy glance of their young eyes full of 
desperation and stony depravity, and their throats hoarse 
with cursing — gamble, and fight, and snarl, and sleej^, hour 
after hour, clashing their bruised centesimi ujjon the marble 
ledges of the church porch. And the images of Christ and 
his angels look down upon it continually. 

Let us enter the church itself. It is lost in still deeper twi- 
light, to which the eye must be accustomed for some moments 
before the form of the building can be traced ; and then there 
opens before us a vast cave, hewn out into the form of a cross, 
and divided into shadowy aisles by many pUlars. Round the 
domes of its roof the light enters only through naiTow aper- 
tures like large stars ; and here and there a ray or two from 
some far-away casement wanders into the darkness, and casts 
a narrow phosphoric stream upon the waves of marble that 
heave and fall in a thousand colors along the floor. What 
else there is of light mK'ftm torches, or silver lamps, burning 
carelessly in the recesses of the chapels ; the roof sheeted 
with gold, and the polished wall covered with alabaster, give 
at every ciirve and angle some feeble gleaming to the flames ; 
and the glories around the heads of the sculptured saints flash 
upon us as we pass them, and smk into the gloom. Under 



THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE. 157 

foot and over head a continual succession of crowded imagery, 
one picture passing into anotlier, as in a dream ; forms beauti- 
ful and terrible mixed together, dragons and serpents, and 
ravening beasts of prey, and graceful birds that in the midst 
of them drink from running fountains and feed from vases of 
crystal ; the passions and the pleasures of human life symbol- 
ised together, ■ and the mystery of its redemption; for the 
mazes of interwoven lines and changeful pictures lead always 
at least to the Cross, lifted and carved in every place and 
upon every stone ; sometimes with the serpent of eternity 
wrapt aroimd it, sometimes with doves against its arms, and 
sweet herbage growmg forth from its feet ; but conspicuous 
most of all on the great rood that crosses the church before 
the altar, raised m bright blazonry against the shadow of the 
apse. And although in the recesses of the aisles and chapels, 
when the mist of the incense hangs heavily, we may see con- 
tinually a figure traced in faint lines upon their marble, a 
woman standing Anth her eyes raised to heaven, and the 
inscription above her, " Mother of God ;" she is not here the 
presiding deity. It is the Cross that is first seen, and always 
burning in the centre of the temple ; and the hollow of its roof 
has the figure of Christ in the utmost height of it, raised in 
power, or returning in judgment. 

The third cupola, that over the altar, represents the witness 
of the Old Testament to Christ, showing him enthroned in 
its centre, and surrounded by the patriarchs and prophets. 
But this dome was little seen by the people ; their contempla- 
tion was intended to be chiefly drawn t^rhat of the centre of 
the church, and thus the mind of the worshipper was at once 
fixed on the main groundwork and hope of Christianity, — • 
" Christ is risen," and " Christ shall come." If he had time 
to explore the minor latei'al chapels and cupolas, he could 
find in them the whole series of New Testament history, the 



158 ARCHITECTURE. 

events of the Life of Christ, and the apostolic mn-acles in 
their order, and finally, the scenery of the Book of Revela- 
tion ; but if he only entered, as often the common people do 
this hour, snatching a few moments before beginning the labor 
of the day to offer up an ejaculatory prayer, and advanced 
but from the main entrance as far as the altar screen, all the 
splendor of the glittering nave and variegated dome, if they 
smote upon his heart, as they might often, in strange contrast 
with his reed cabin among the shallows of the lagoon, smote 
upon it only that they might proclaim the two great mes- 
sages — " Christ is risen," and " Christ shall come." Daily, as 
the white cupolas rose like wreaths of sea-foam in the dawn, 
while the shadowy campanile and frowning palace were still 
withdrawn into the night, they rose with the Easter Voice 
of Triumph, — " Christ is risen ;" and daily, as they looked 
down upon the tumult of the people, deepening and eddjing 
in the wide square that opened from their feet to the sea, they 
uttered above them the sentence of warning, — " Christ shall 
come." 

And this thought may surely dispose the reader to look 
M'ith some change of temper upon the gorgeous building 
and wild blazonry of that shrine of St. Mark's. He now per- 
ceives that it was in the hearts of the old Venetian people far 
more than a place of worship. It was at once a type of the 
Redeemed Church of God, and a scroll for the written word 
of God. It was to be to them both an image of the Bride, 
all gloi'ious within^ her clothing of wrought gold ; and 
the actual Table of the Law and the Testimony, written 
j Mdthm and without. And whether honored as the Church or 
I as the Bible, was it not fitting that neither the gold nor the 
crystal should be spared in the adornment of it ; that, as the 
symbol of the Bride, the building of the wall thereof should 
be of jasper, and the foundations of -it garnished with all man 



THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE. 159 

ner of precious stones; and that, as the channel of the '\Vord, 
that triumphant utterance of the Psahiiist should be true of 
it, — " I have rejoiced in the way of thy testimonies, as much 
as in all riches ?" And shall we not look with changed tem- 
per down the long perspective of St. Mark's Place towards 
the sevenfold gates and glowing domes of its temple, 
when we know with what solemn purpose the shafts of it 
were lifted above the pavement of the populous square ? Men 
met there from all countries of the earth, for traffic or for 
pleasure ; but, above the crowd swaying for ever to and fro in 
the restlessness of avarice or thirst of delight, was seen per- 
petually the glory of the temple, attesting to them, whether 
they would hear or whether they would forbear, that there 
was one treasure which the merchantman might buy without a 
price, and one delight better than all others, in the word and 
the statutes of God. 

Not in the wantonness of wealth, not in vain ministry to the 
desire of the eyes or the pride of life, were those marbles 
hewn into transparent strength, and those arches arrayed in 
the colors of the u'is. There is a message written in the dyes 
of them, that once Avas written in blood ; and a sound in the 
echoes of their vaults, that one day shall fill the vault of 
heaven, — "He shall return, to do judgment and justice." 
The strength of Venice was given her, so long as she remem- 
bered this : her destruction found her when she had forgotten 
this ; and it found her irrevocably, because she forgot it with- 
out excuse. \ Never had city a more glorious Bible.' Among 
the nations of the North, a rude and shadowy sculpture filled 
their temples with confused and hardly legible imagery ; but, 
for her, the skiU and the treasures of the East had gilded every 
letter, and illumined every page, till the Book-Temple shone 
from afar ofi" like the star of the Magi. In other cities, the 
meetings of the people were often in places withdrawn from 



160 AECHITECTURE. 

religious association, subject to violence and to chaiige ; and 
on the grass of the dangerous rampart, and in the dust of the 
troubled street, there were deeds done and counsels taken, 
which, if we cannot justify, we may sometimes forgive. But 
the sins of Venice, whether in her palace or in her piazza, 
were done with theJBible at her right hand. The walls on 
which its testimony was written were separated but by a few 
inches of marble from those which guarded the secrets of her 
councils, or confined the victims of her policy. And when in 
her last hours she threw off all shame and all restraint, and 
the great square of the city became filled with the madness 
of the whole earth, be it remembered how much her sin M'as 
greater, because it was done in the face of the House of God, 
burning with the letters of His Law. Mountebank and mas- 
quer laughed their laugh, and went their way ; and a silence 
has followed them, not unforetold; for amidst them all, 
through century after century of gathering vanity and fester- 
ing guilt, the wliite dome of St. Mark's had uttered in the 
dead ear of Venice, "Know thou, that for all these things, 
God will bring thee into judgment." 

Such, then, was that first and fairest Venice which rose out 
of the barrenness of the lagoon, and the sorrow of her people ; 
a city of graceful arcades and gleaming walls, veined with 
azure and warm with gold, and fretted with white sculpture 
like frost upon forest branches turned to marble. And yet, 
in this beauty of her youth, she was no city of thoughtless 
pleasure. There was still a sadness of heart upon her, and a 
depth of devotion, in which lay all her strength. I do not 
insist upon the probable religious signification of many of the 
sculptures which are now difficult of interpretation ; but the 
temper which made the cross the principal ornament of every 
building is not to be misunderstood, nor can we fail to per- 
ceive, in many of the minor sculptural subjects, meauings 



THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE. 161 

perfectly familiar to the mind of early Christianity. The 
peacock, used in preference to every other kmd of bkd, is the 
well known symbol of the resurrection ; and, when drmking 
from a fountain or from a font, is, I doubt not, also a type of 
the new Hfe jcficgiyed in faithful baptism. The vine, used in 
preference to all other trees, was equally recognised as, in 
all cases, a type either of Christ Himself or of those who were 
in a state of visible or professed union with Him. The dove, 
at its foot, represents the coming of the Comforter ; and even 
the groups of contending animals had, probably, a distinct 
and universally apprehended reference to the powers of evil. 
But I lay no stress on these more occult meanings. The prin- 
cipal circumstance which marks the seriousness of the early 
Venetian mmd is perhaps the last in which the reader would 
suppose it was traceable ; — that love of bright and pure_color 
which, in a modified form, was afterwards the root of all the 
triumph of the Venetian schools of painting, but which, in its 
utmost simplicity, was characteristic of the Byzantine period 
only ; and of which, therefore, in the close of our review of 
that period, it will be well that we should truly estimate the 
significance. The fact is, we none of us enough appreciate 
the nobleness and sacredness of color. Nothing is more com- 
mon than to hear it spoken of as a subordinate beauty, — nay, 
even as the mere source of a sensual pleasure ; and we might 
almost believe that we were daily among men who 

" Could strip, for aught the prospect yields 
To them, their verdure from the fields ; 
And take the radiance from the clouds 
"With which the sun his setting shrouds." 

But it is not so. Such expressions are used for the most part 
in thoughtlessness ; and if the speakers would only take the 
pains to imagine what the world and their own existence 



162 AECHITECTUEE. 

would become, if the blue were taken from the sky, and the 
gold from the sunshine, and the verdure from the leaves, and 
the crimson from the blood which is the life of man, the flush 
from the cheek, the darkness from the eye, the radiance from 
the hair, — if they could but see, for an instant, white human 
creatures living in a white world, — they would soon feel 
what they owe to color. The fact is, that of all God's gifts 
to the sight of man, color is the holiest, the most divine, the 
most solemn. We speak rashly of gay color and sad color, 
for color cannot at once be good and gay. All good color is 
in some degree pensive, the loveliest is melancholy, and the 
purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color 
the most. 

I know that this will sound strange in many ears, and will 
be especially startling to those who have considered the sub- 
ject chiefly with reference to painting ; for the great Venetian 
schools of color are not usually understood to be either 
pure or pensive, and the idea of its pre-eminence is associated 
in nearly every mind with the coarseness of Rubens, and the 
sensualities of Correggio and Titian. But a more comprehen- 
sive view of art will soon correct this impression. It will be 
discovered, in the first place, that the more faithful and 
earnest the religion of the painter, the more pure and prevalent 
is the system of his color. It wUl be found, in the second 
place, that where color becomes a primal intention with a 
painter otherwise mean or sensual, it instantly elevates him, 
and becomes the one sacred and saving element in his work. 
The very depth of the stoop to which the Venetian painters 
and Rubens sometimes condescend, is a consequence of their 
feeling confidence in the power of their color to keep them 
from falling. They hold on by it, as by a chain let down from 
heaven, with one hand, though they may sometunes seem to 
gather dust and ashes with the other. And, in the last place. 



THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE. 163 

it wi J be found that so surely as a painter is iineligious, thought* 
less, or obscene in disjjosition, so surely is his coloring cold, 
gloomy, and valueless. The opposite poles of art in this res- 
pect are Fra Angelico and Salvator Rosa ; of whom the one 
was a man Avho smiled seldom, wept often, prayed constantly, 
and never harbored an impure thought. His pictures are 
simply so many pieces of jewellery, the colors of the draperies 
being perfectly pure, as various as those of a painted window, 
chastened only by paleness, and relieved upon a gold ground. 
Salvator was a dissipated jester and satirist, a man who spent 
his life in masquing and revelry. But his pictures are full of 
horror, and their color is for the most part gloomy-grey. 
Truly, it would seem as if art had so much of eternity in it, 
that it must take its dye from the close rather than the 
course of life. <" Li such laughter the heart of man is sorrow- 
ful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness." ( 

These are no singular instances. I know no law more 
severely without exception than this of the connexion of pure 
color with profound and noble thought. The late Flemish 
pictures, shallow in conception and obscure in subject, are 
always sombre in color. But the early rehgious jjainting of 
the Flemings is as brilliant in hue as it is holy in thought. 
The Bellinis, Francias, Peruginos, painted in crimson, and 
blue, and gold. The Caraccis, Guides, and Rembrandts in 
brown and grey. The builders of our great cathedi-als veiled 
their casements and wrapped their pillars with one robe of 
purple splendor. The builders of the luxurious Renaissance 
left their palaces filled only with cold white light, and in the 
paleness of their native stone. 

Nor does it seem difficult to discern a noble reason for this 
universal law. In that heavenly circle which binds the statutes 
of color upon the front of the sky, when it became the sign 
of the covenant of peace, the pure hues of divided light were 



164 AECHITECTUEE. 

sanctified to the human heart for ever; nor this, it wouhJ 
seem, by mere arbitrary appointment, but in consequence of 
the fore-ordained and marA^ellous constitution of those hues 

/ into a sevenfold, or, more strictly still, a threefold order, typical 

( of the Divine nature itself 

I The whole church of St. Mark's was a great Book of Com- 

( mon Prayer, the mosaics were its illuminations, and the com- 
mon people of the time were taught their scripture history by 
means of them, more imj)ressively perhaps, though far less 
fully, than ours are now by scripture reading. They had no 
other bible — and Protestants do not often enough consider 
this — could have no other. We find it somewhat difiicult to 
furnish our poor with printed bibles ; consider what the diffi- 
culty must have been when they could be given only in 
manuscript. The walls of the church necessarily became the 
poor man's Bible, and a picture was more easily read upon the 
walls than a chapter. 

GOTHIC AECHITECTUKE. 

"We all have some notion, most of us a very determined 
one, of the meaning of the term Gothic ; but I know that 
many persons have this idea in their minds without being able 
to define it : that is to say, understanding generally that West- 
minster Abbey is Gothic, and St. Paul's is not, that Strasburgh 
Cathedral is Gothic and St. Peter's is not, they have, never- 
theless, no clear notion of what it is that they recognise in one 
or miss in the other, such as would enable them to say how 
far the work at Westminster or Strasburgh is good and pure 
of its kind ; still less to say of any nondescript building, like 
St. James's Palace or Windsor Castle, how much right Gothic 
element there is in it, and how much wanting. And I believe 
this inquiry to be a pleasant and profitable one ; and that there 
will be found something more than usually interesting in trac- 



GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE. IGt"; 

irig out this grey, sliadowy, many pinnacled image of the 
Gothic spirit withm us ; and discerning what fellowship there 
is between it and our Northern hearts. And if, at any point 
of the inquiry, I should interfere with any of the reader's pre- 
viously formed conceptions, and use the term Gothic in any 
sense which he would not willingly attach to it, I do not ask 
him to accept, but only to examine and understand my inter- 
pretation, as necessary to the intelligibility of what follows. 

We have, then, tl^e Gothic character submitted to our ana- 
lysis, just as the rough mineral is substituted to that of the 
chemist, entangled wdth many other foreign substances, itself 
perhai^s in no place pure, or ever to be obtained or seen in 
purity for more than an instant ; but nevertheless a thing of 
definite and separate nature, however inextricable or confused 
in appearance. Now observe : the chemist defines his mineral 
by two separate kinds of characters ; one external, its crystal- 
line form, hardness, lustre, &c. ; the other, internal ; the pro- 
portions and nature of its constituent atoms. Exactly ia the 
same manner, we shall find that Gothic architecture has exter- 
nal forms, and mternal elements. Its elements are certain 
mental tendencies of the builders, legibly expressed in it ; as 
flmcifulness, love of variety, love of richness, and such others. 
Its external forms are pointed arches, vaulted roofs, &c. And 
unless both the elements and the forms are there, w^e have no 
right to call the style Gothic. It is not enough that it has the 
Form, if it have not also the power and life. It is not enough 
that it has the Power, if it have not the form. We must there- 
fore inquire into each of these characters successively ; and de- 
termine, first, what is the Mental Expression, and secondly, what 
the Material Form, of Gothic Architecture, properly so called, 

1st. Mental Power or Expression. What characters, we 
have to discover, did the Gothic builders love, or instinctively 
exurcss in their work, as distinguished from all other builders? 



166 AKCHITECrURE. 

Let us go back for a moment to our chemistry, and note 
that, in detining a mineral by its constituent parts, it is not 
OLe nor another of them that can make up the mineral, but 
the union of aU : for instance, it is neither in charcoal, nor in 
oxygen, nor in lime, that there is the making of chalk, but in 
the combination of all three in certain measures ; they are all 
found in very diiferent things from chalk, and there is nothing 
like chalk either in charcoal or in oxygen, but they are never- 
theless necessary to its existence. 

So in various mental characters which make up the soul of 
Gothic. It is not one nor another that produces it, but their 
union in certain measures. Each one of them is found in 
many other architectures besides Gothic ; but Gothic cannot 
exist where they are not found, or, at least, where their place 
is not in some way suppUed. Only there is this great difference 
between the composition of the mineral, and of the architectu- 
ral style, that if we withdraw one of its elements from the 
stone, its form is utterly changed, and its existence as such 
and such a mineral is destroyed ; but if we withdraw one of 
its mental elements from the Gothic style, it is only a little less 
Gothic than it was before, and the union of two or three of 
its elements is enough already to bestow a certain Gothicness 
of character, which gains in intensity as we add the others, 
and loses as we again withdraw them. 

I believe, then, that the characteristic or moral elements of 
Gothic are the following, placed in the order of their impor- 
ance: 

1. Savageness. 

2. Changefulness. 

3. Naturalism. 

4. Grotesqueness. 

5. Rigidity. 

6. Redundance. 



GOTHIC ARCHITECTUEE. 167 

These characters are here expressed as belonging to the 
buildings ; as belonging to the builder, they would be expressed 
thus: — 1. Savageness or Rudeness. 2, Love of Change. 3. 
Love of Nature. 4. Disturbed Imagination. 5. Obstinacy. 
6. Generosity. And I repeat, that the withdrawal of any one, 
or any two, will not at once destroy the Gothic character of a 
building, but the removal of a majority of them will. 

I am not sure when the word "Gothic" was first generi- 
cally appHed to the architecture of the North ; but I presume 
that, whatever the date of its original usage, it was intended 
to imply reproach, and express the barbaric character of the 
nations among whom that architecture arose. It never implied 
that they were Uterally of Gothic lineage, far less that their 
architecture had been originally invented by the Goths them- 
selves ; but it did imply that they and their biuldings together 
exhibited a degree of sternness and rudeness which, in contra- 
distinction to the character of Southern and Eastern nations, 
appeared like a perpetual reflection of the contrast between the 
Goth and Roman in their first encounter. And when that 
fallen Roman, in the utmost impotence of his luxury, and 
msolence of his guUt, became the model for the imitation of 
civilized Euroj^e, at the close of the so-caUed Dark ages, the 
word Gothic became a term of unmitigated contempt, not 
unmixed with aversion. From that contempt, by the exertion 
of the antiquaries and architects of this century, Gothic archi- 
tecture has been sufiiciently vindicated ; and perhaps some 
among us, in our admiration of the magnificent science of its 
structure and sacredness of its expression, might desire that 
the term of ancient reproach should be withdrawn, and some 
other, of more apparent honorableness, adopted in its place. 
There is no chance, as there is no need, of such a substitution. 
As far as the epithet was used scornfully, it was used falsely ; 
but there is no reproach in the word rightly understood ; on 



1 C 8 AECHTTECTURE. 

the contrary, there is a profound truth, whieh the mstinct oi 
mankind almost unconsciously recognises. 

It is true, greatly and deeply true, that the architecture of 
the North is rude and wild ; but it is not true that, for this 
reason, we are to condemn it, or despise. Far otherwise : 1 
believe it is in this very character that it deserves our j)ro- 
foundest reverence. 



THE GROTESQUE. 



The grotesque which comes to all men in a disturbed dream, 
is the most mtelligible example (of the error and wildness 
of the mental impressions caused by fear operating upon 
strong powers of imagination) but also the most ignoble ; 
the imagination, m this instance, being entirely deprived 
of all aid from reason, and mcapable of self-government. 
I believe, however, that the noblest forms of imaginative 
power are also in some sort ungovernable, and have in 
them something of the character of dreams ; so that the vision, 
of whatever kind, comes uncalled, and will not submit itself 
to the seer, but conquers him, and forces him to speak as a 
prophet, having no power over his words or thoughts. Only, 
if the whole man be trained perfectly, and his mind calm, con- 
sistent, and powerful, the vision which comes to him is seen as 
in a perfect mirror, serenely, and in consistence with the 
rational powers ; but if the mind be imperfect and ill trained, 
the vision is seen as in a broken mirror, with strange distor- 
tions and discrepancies, all the passions of the heart breathing 
upon it in cross ripples, till hardly a trace of it remains un- 
broken. So that, strictly speaking, the imagination is never 
governed ; it is always the ruling and Divine power : and the 
rest of the man is to it only as an instrument which it sounds, 



THE GROTESQUE. 169 

or a tablet on which it writes ; clearly and sublimely if the wax 
be smooth and the strings true, grotesquely and wildly if they 
are stained and broken. And thus the " Iliad," the " Inferno," 
the " Pilgrim's Progress," the " Faerie Queen," are all of 
them true dreams ; only the sleep of the men to whom they 
came was the deep, living sleep which God sends, with a 
sacredness in it as of death, the revealer of secrets. 

Now observe in this matter, carefully, the difference between 
a dim mirror and a distorted one ; and do not blame me foi* 
pressing the analogy too far, for it will enable me to explain 
my meaning every way more clearly. Most men's minds are 
dim mirrors, in which all truth is seen, as St. Paul tells us, 
darkly : this is the fault most common and most fatal ; dulness 
of the hear: and mistiness of sight, increasing to utter hardness 
and blindness ; Satan breathing upon the glass, so that, if we 
do not sweep the mist laboriously away, it will take no image. 
But, even so far as we are able to do this, we have still the 
distortion to fear, yet not to the same extent, for we can in 
some sort allow for the distortion of an image, if only we can 
see it clearly. And the fallen human soul, at its best, must be 
as a diminishing glass, and that a broken one, to the mighty 
truths of the universe around it ; and the wider the scope of 
its glance, and the vaster the truths into which it obtains an 
insight, the more fantastic their distortion is likely to be, as 
the winds and the vapors trouble the field of the telescope 
most when it reaches farthest. 

It is not, however, in every symbolical subject that the 
fearful grotesque becomes embodied to the full. The element 
of distortion which affects the intellect when dealing with 
subjects above its proper capacity, is as nothing compared 
with that which it sustains from the direct impressions of 
terror. It is the trembling of the human soul in the presence 
of deatJi which most of all disturbs the imncros on the Intel- 



170 ABCHITECTUKB. 

lectual miiTor, and invests them with the fitfulness and ghastli« 
ness of dreams. And from the contemplation of death, and of 
the pangs which follow his footsteps, arise in men's hearts the 
troop of strange and iri-esistible superstitions, which, more or 
less melancholy or majestic according to the dignity of the 
mind they impress, are yet never without a certain grotesque- 
ness, following on the paralysis of the reason and over-excite- 
ment of the fancy. I do not mean to deny the actual existence 
of spiritual manifestations ; I have never weighed the evidence 
upon the subject ; but with these, if such exist, we are not 
here concerned. The grotesque Avhich we are examinii g 
arises out of that condition of mind which appears to folio vv 
naturally upon the contemplation of death, and in which the 
fancy is brought into morbid action by terror, accompanied by 
the belief in spiritual presence, and in the possibility of spiri- 
tual apparition. Hence are developed its most sublime, be- 
cause its least voluntary, creations, aided by the fearfulness 
of the phenomena of nature which are in any wise the minis- 
ters of death, and primarily directed by the peculiar ghastli- 
ness of expression in the skeleton, itself a species of terrible 
grotesque in its relation to the perfect human frame. 

Thus, first born from the dusty and dreadful whiteness of 
the charnel house, but softened in their forms by the holiest 
of human affections, went forth the troop of wild and Avondei*- 
ful images, seen through tears, that had the mastery over our 
Northern hearts for so many ages. The powers of sudden de- 
struction lurking in the woods and waters, in the rocks and 
clouds; — kelpie and gnome, Lurlei and Hartz spirits; the 
Avraith and foreboding phantom ; the spectra of second sight ; 
the various conceptions of avenging or tormented ghost, 
haunting the perpetrator of crime, or expiating its commis- 
sion ; and the half fictitious and contemplative, half visionary 
and believed images of the presence of death itself, doing its 



THE GROTESQUE. lYl 

daily work in the chambers of sickness and sin, and waiting for 
its hour iu the fortalices of strength and the high places of 
pleasvu-e ; — these, partly degrading us by the instinctive and 
paralysing terror with which they are attended, and partly 
ennobling us by leading our thoughts to dwell in the eternal 
world, till the last and the most imjDortant circle in that great 
kingdom of dark and distorted power, of which we all must 
be in some sort the subjects until mortality shall be swallowed / 
\\l> of life ; until the waters of the last fordless river cease to; 
roll their untransparent volume between us and the hght of 
heaven, and neither death stand between us and our brethren, 
nor symbols between us and our God. 

If, then, ridding ourselves as far as possible of prejudices 
owing merely to the school-teaching which remains from the 
system of the Renaissance, we set ourselves to discover in 
what races the human soul, taken all in all, reached its highest 
magnificence, we shall find, I believe, two great famiUes of 
men, one of the East and South, the other of the West and 
North: the one including the Egyptians, Jews, Arabians, 
Assyrians, and Persians; the other I know not whence derived, 
but seeming to flow forth from Scandinavia, and filling the 
whole of Europe Avith its Xorman and Gothic energy. And 
in both these families, wherever they are seen in their ut 
most nobleness, there the grotesque is developed in its utmost 
energy ; and I hardly know whether most to admire the 
winged bulls of Nineveh, or the winged dragons of Verona. 

The charts of the woi'ld which have been drawn up by 
modern science have thrown into a narrow space the ex^sres- 
sion of a vast amount of knowledge, but I have never yet 
seen any one pictorial enough to enable the spectator to 
imagine the kind of contrast in physical character which 



172 ARCHITECTURE. 

exists between northern and southern countries. We knoAV 
the differences in detail, but we have not that broad glance 
and grasp which would enable us to feel them in their fulness 
We know that gentians grow on the Alps, and olives on the 
Apennmes ; but we do not enough conceive for ourselves that 
varigated mosaic of the world's surface which a bird sees in 
its migration, that difference between the district of the gen- 
tian and of the olive which the stork and the swallow see far 
off, as they lean upon the sirocco wind. Let us, for a moment, 
try to raise ourselves even above the level of their flight, and 
imagine the Mediterranean lying beneath us like an irregular 
lake, and aU its ancient promontories sleeping in the sun ; here 
and there an angry spot of thunder, a grey stain of storm, 
moving upon the burning field ; and here and there a fixed 
wreath of white volcano smoke, surrounded by its circle of 
ashes ; but for the most part a great peacefuluess of light, Syria 
and Greece, Italy and S^^ain, laid like pieces of golden pave- 
ment into the sea-blue, chased, as we stoop near to them, with 
bossy beaten work of mountain chains, and glowing softly 
with terraced gardens, and flowers heavy with frankincense, 
mixed among masses of laurel, and orange, and plumy palm, 
that abate with their grey-green shadows the burning of the 
marble rocks, and of the ledges of porj^hyry sloping under 
lucent sand. Then let us pass farther towards the north, until 
we see the orient colors change gradually into a vast belt of 
rainy green, where the pastures of Switzerland, and poplar val- 
leys of France, and dark forests of the Danube and Car[)athians 
stretch from the mouths of the Loire to those of the Volga, seen 
through clefts in grey swirls of rain-cloud and flaky veils of 
the mist of the brooks, spreading low along the pasture lands \ 
and then, farther north still, to see the earth heave into mighty 
masses of leaden rock and heathy moor, ])ordering with a 
broad waste of gloomy purple that belt of field and wood, and 



THE GROTESQUE. 173 

splintering into irregular and grisly islands amidst tlie north 
ern seas, beaten by storm, and chilled by ice-drift, and tor- 
mented by furious pulses of contending tide, until the roots 
of the last forests fail from among the hill ravmes, and the 
hunger of the north wind bites their peaks mto barrenness ; 
and, at last, the wall of ice durable like iron, sets, death- 
like, its white teeth against us out of the polar twilight. And, 
having once ti'aversed in thought this gradation of the zoned 
iris of the earth in all its material vastness, let us go down 
nearer to it, and watch the parallel change in the belt of animal 
life : the multitudes of s^aft and brilliant creatures that glance 
in the air and sea, or tread the sands of the southern zone ; 
striped zebras and spotted leopards, glistening serpents, and 
birds arrayed in purple and scarlet. Let us contrast their 
delicacy and brilUancy of color, and swiftness of motion, with 
the frost-cramped strength, and shaggy covering, and dusky 
plumage of the northern tribes ; contrast the Arabian horse 
with the Shetland, the tiger and leopard with the wolf and 
bear, the antelope with the elk, the bird of paradise with the 
osprey ; and then, submissively acknowledging the great laws 
by which the earth and all that it bears are ruled throughout 
their being, let us not condemn, but rejoice in the expression 
by man of his own rest in the statutes of the land that gave 
him birth. Let us watch him with reverence as he sets side 
by side the burning gems, and smooths with soft sculpture 
the jasper pillai's, that are to reflect a ceaseless sunshine, and 
rise into a cloudless sky ; but not with less reverence let us 
stand by him, when, with rough strength and hurried stroke, 
he smites an uncouth animation out of the rocks Avhich he has 
torn from among the moss of the moorland, and heaves into 
the darkened air the pile of iron buttress and rugged wall, 
instinct with work of an imagination as wild and wayward as 
the northern sea ; creations of ungainly shape and rigid limb, 



174 ARCHITECTURE. 

but full of wolfish life ; fierce as the -winds that beat, and 
changeful as the clouds that shade them. 

In one jDoint of view Gothic is not only the best but the 
only rational architecture, as being that which can fit itself 
most easily to all sei'vices, vulgar or noble. Undefined in its 
slope of roof, height of shaft, breadth of arch, or disposition 
of ground plan, it can shrink into a turret, expand into a hall, 
coil into a staircase, or sjDring into a spire, with undegraded 
grace and unexhausted energy ; and whenever it finds occasion 
for change in its form or purpose, it submits to it without the 
shghtest sense of loss either to its unity or majesty, — subtle 
and flexible like a fiery sei'pent, but ever attentive to the voice 
of the charmer. . And it is one of the chief virtues of the 
Gothic bunders, that they never suffered ideas of outside 
symmetries and consistencies to interfere with the real use and 
value of what they did. If they Avanted a window, they 
opened one ; a room, they added one ; a buttress, they built 
one ; utterly regardless of any established conventionalities of 
external appearance, knowing (as indeed it always haj^pened) 
that such daring interruptions of the formal plan would 
rather give additional interest to its symmetry than injure it. 
So that, in the best .times of Gothic, a useless Avindow would 
rather have been opened in an unexpected place for the sake 
of the surprise, than a useful one forbidden for the .sake of 
symmetry. Every successive architect, employed upon a great 
work, built the pieces he added in his own way, utterly regard- 
less of the style adopted by his predecessors ; and if two 
towers were raised in nominal correspondence at the sides of 
a cathedral front, one was nearly sure to be different fi'om the 
other, and in each the style at the top to be different from the 
etyle at the bottom. 

The most striking outward feature in all Gothic architecture 



THE GROTESQUE. 175 

is, that it is composed of pointed arches, as in Romanesque 
that it is in like manner composed of romid ; and this distinc- 
tion would be quite as clear, though the roofs were taken 
off every cathedral in Europe. And yet, if we examine care- 
fully into the real force and meaning of the term " roof," we 
shall, perhaps, be able to retain the old popular idea in a defi- 
nition of Gothic architecture, which shall also express what- 
ever dependence that architecture has upon true forms of 
roofing- 
Roofs are generally divided into two parts ; the roof proper, 
that is to say, the shell, vault, or ceiling, internally visible ; 
and the roof-mask, which protects this lower roof from the 
weather. In some buildings these parts are united in one 
frame-work ; but in most they are more or less independent 
of each othei', and in nearly all Gothic buildings there is a 
considerable interval between them. 

Now it will often happen, that owing to the nature of the 
apartments required, or the materials at hand, the roof pro- 
per may be flat, coved, or domed, in buildings which in their 
walls employ pointed arches, and are, in the straitest sense of 
the word, Gothic in all other respects. Yet so far forth as the 
roofing alone is concerned, they are not Gothic unless the 
pointed arch be the principal foim adopted either in the stone 
vaulting or the timbers of the roof proper. 

I shall say then, in the first place, that " Gothic architecture 
is that which uses, if possible, the pointed arch in the roof 
proper." This is the first step in our definition. 

Secondly. Although there may be many advisable or neces- 
sary forms for the lower roof or ceiling, there is, in cold coun- 
tries exposed to rain and enow, only one advisable form 
for the roof mask, and that is the gable, for this alone will 
throw off both rain and snow from all parts of its surface as 
speedily as possible. Snow can lodge on the top of a dome, 



1 76 AKCHITEOTU KE. 

not OH the ridge of a gable. And thus, as far as roofing ia 
concerned, tlie gable is a far more essential feature of Northern 
architecture than the pointed vault, for the one is a thorough 
necessity, the other often a grateful conventionahty ; the gable 
occurs in the timber-roof of every dwelling-house and every 
cottage, but not the vault ; and the gable built on a polygonal 
or circular i:)lan, is the origin of the turret and spire ; and all 
the so-called aspiration of Gothic architecture is nothing 
more than its development. So that we must add to our 
definition another clause, which will be at present by far the 
most important, and it will stand thus : " Gothic architecture 
is that which uses the pointed arch for the roof proper, and 
the gable for the roof-mask." 

And here, in passing, let us notice a principle as true in archi- 
tecture as in morals. It is not the compelled, but the wilful, 
transgression of law which corrupts the character. Sin is not 
in the act, but in the choice. It is a law for Gothic architec- 
ture, that it shall use the pointed arch for its roof proper ; but 
because, in many cases of domestic building, this becomes 
impossible for want of room (the whole height of the apart- 
ment being required every where), or in various other ways 
jiconvenient, flat ceilings may be used, and yet the Gothic 
shall not lose its purity. But in the roof-mask there can be 
no necessity nor reason for a change of form : the gable is the 
best ; and if any other — dome, or bulging crown, or whatso- 
ever else — be employed at all, it must be in pure caprice and 
wilful transgression of law. And wherever, therefore, this is 
done, the Gothic has lost its character ; it is pure Gothic no 
more. 

I plead for the introduction of the Gothic form into our 
domestic architecture, not merely because it is lovely, but 
becau.se it is the only form of faithful, strong, enduring, and 



THE GROTESQUE. 1*77 

honorable buildmg, in sucli materials as come daily to our 
hands. By an increase of scale and costs it is impossible to 
build, in any style, what will last for ages ; but only in the 
Gothic is it possible to give security and dignity to work 
wrought with imperfect means and materials. And I trust that 
there will come a time when the English people may see the 
folly of buildmg basely and insecurely. It is common with 
those architects against whose practice my writings have 
hitherto been directed, to call them merely theoretical and 
imaginative. I answer, that there is not a single principle 
asserted either m the " Seven Lamps" or here, but is of the 
simplest, sternest veracity, and the easiest practicability ; that 
buildings, raised as I would have them, would stand unshaken 
for a thousand years ; and the buildings raised by the archi- 
tects who oppose them will not stand for one hundred and 
fifty, they sometimes do not stand for an hour. There is 
hardly a week passes Avithout some catastrophe brought about 
by the base principles of modern buUding : some vaultless 
floor that drops the staggering crowd through the jagged 
rents of its rotten timbers; some baseless bridge that is 
washed away by the first wave of a common flood ; some 
fungous wall of nascent rottenness that a thunder-shower soaks 
down with its workmen into a heap of slime and death. These 
we hear of, day by day ; yet these indicate but a thousandth 
part of the evil. The portion of the national income sacri- 
ficed in mere bad building, in the perpetual repairs, and swift 
condemnation and pulling down of ill-built shells of houses, 
passes all calculation. And the weight of the penalty is not 
yet felt ; it will tell upon our children some fifty years hence, 
when the cheap work, and contract work, and stucco and 
plaster work, and bad iron work, and all the other expedients 
of modern rivalry, vanity, and dishonesty, begin to show 
themselves for what they are. 

8* 



178 AECHITECTUEE. 



THE EENAISSANCE. 



Althougli Renaissance architecture assumes very differei:t 
forms among diiferent nations, it may be conveniently referred 
to three heads : — Early Renaissance, consisting of the first cor- 
ruptions introduced into the Gothic schools : Central or Roman 
Renaissance, which is the perfectly formed style ; and Grotesque 
Renaissance, which is the corruption of the Renaissance itself. 

Now, in order to do full justice to the adverse cause, we will 
consider the abstract nature of the school with reference only 
to its best or central examples. The forms of building which 
must be classed generally under the term early Renaissance 
are, in many cases, only the extravagances and corruptions of 
the languid Gothic, for whose errors the classical principle is in 
no wise answerable. It was stated in the " Seven Lamps," 
that unless luxury had enervated and subtlety falsified the 
Gothic forms, Roman traditions could not have prevailed 
agamst them ; and, although these enervated and false condi- 
tions are almost instantly colored by the classical influence, it 
would be utterly unfair to lay to the charge of that influence 
the first debasement of the earlier schools, which had lost the 
strength of their system before they could be struck by the 
plague. 

The manner, however, of the debasement of all schools of 
art, so far as it is natural, is in all ages the same ; luxuriance 
of ornament, refinement of execution, and idle subtleties of 
fancy, taking the place of true thought and firm handling ; and 
I do not intend to delay the reader long by the Gothic sick- 
bed, for our task is not so much to watch the wasting of fever 
in the features of the expiring King, as to trace the character 
of that Hazael who dipped the cloth m water, and laid it upon 
his face. Nevertheless, it is necessary to the completeness of 
our view of the architecture of Venice, as well as to our under- 



THE EENAISSANCE. 179 

Standing of the manner in which the Central Renaissance 
obtained its universal dominion, that we glance briefly at the 
principal forms into which Venetian Gothic first declined. They 
are two in number : one the corruption of the Gothic itself; 
the other a partial return to Byzantine forms: for the Venetian 
mind having carried the Gothic to a point at which it was dis- 
satisfied, tried to retrace its steps, fell back first upon Byzantine 
types, and through them passed to the first Roman, But in 
thus retracing its steps, it does not recoA^er its own lost energy. 
It revisits the places through which it had passed in the morn-, 
ing Ught, but it is now with wearied Hmbs, and under the 
gloomy shadow of the evening. 

Against this degraded Gothic, then, came up the Renaissance 
armies; and their first assault was in the requirement of 
universal perfection. For the first time since the destruction 
of Rome, the world had seen, in the work of the greatest 
artists of the fifteenth century, — in the paintmg of Ghirlandajo, 
Masaccio, Francia, Perugino, Pinturicchio, and Bellini ; in the 
sculpture of Mino da Fiesole, of Ghiberti, and Verrocchio, — a 
perfection of execution and fulness of knowledge which cast 
all previous art into the shade, and which, being in the work 
of those men united with all that was great in that of former 
days, did indeed justify the utmost enthusiasm with which their 
efforts were, or could be, regarded. But when this perfection 
had once been exhibited in anything, it was required in every- 
thing ; the Avorld could no longer be satisfied with less exquisite 
execution, or less discii^lined knowledge. The first thing that 
it demanded in all work was, that it should be done in a con- 
summate and learned way ; and men altogether forgot that it 
was possible to consummate what was contemptible, and to 
know what was useless. Imperatively requiring dexterity of 
touch, they gradually forgot to look for tenderness of feeling ; 



1 80 ABCHITECTUEE. 

imperatively requiring accuracy of knowledge, they gradually 
forgot to ask for originality of thought. The thought and the 
feeling which they despised departed from them, and they were 
left to felicitate themselves on their small science and their neat 
fingering. This is the history of the first attack of the Renais- 
sance upon the Gothic schools, and of its rapid results ; more 
fatal and immediate in architecture than in any other art, 
because there the demand for perfection was less reasonable, 
and less consistent with the capabilities of the workman; 
being utterly opposed to that rudeness or savageness on which, 
as we saw above, the nobility of the elder schools in great part 
depends. But, inasmuch as the innovations were founded on 
some of the most beautiful examples of art, and headed by some 
of the greatest men that the world ever saw, and as the Gothic 
with which they interfered -svas corrupt and valueless, the first 
appearance of the Renaissance feeling had the appearance of a 
healthy movement. A new energy replaced whatever weari- 
ness or dulness had affected the Gothic muid; an exquisite 
taste and refinement, aided by extended knowledge, furnished 
the first models of the new school ; and over the whole of Italy 
a style arose, generally known as cinque-cento, which in sculp- 
ture and painting, as I just stated, produced the noblest mas- 
ters whom the world ever saw, headed by Michael Angelo, 
Raphael, and Leonardo ; but which failed in doing the same in 
architecture, because, as we have seen above, perfection is 
therein not possible, and failed more totally than it would 
otherwise have done, because the classical enthusiasm had des- 
troyed the best types of architectural form. 

The efiect, then, of the sudden enthusiasm for classical lite- 
rature, which gained strength during every hour of the 
fifteenth century, was, as far as respected architecture, to do 
away with the entire system of Gothic science. The pointed 



THE KENAISSANCE. 181 

arch, the shadowy vault, the clustered shaft, the heaven-pomt- 
ing spire, were aJ swept away ; and no structure was any 
longer j^ermitted but that of the plam cross-beam from pillai 
to pillar, over the round arch with square or cii'cular shafts, 
and a low gabled roof and pediment ; two elements of noble 
form, which had fortunately existed in Rome, were, however, 
for that reason, still permitted ; the cupola, and, internally, the 
waggon vault. 

Do not let me be misunderstood when I speak generally of 
the evil spirit of the Renaissance. The reader may look 
through all I have written, from iirst to last, and he will not 
find one word but the most profound reverence for tfiose 
mighty men who could wear the Renaissance armor of proof, 
and yet not feel it encumber their hving limbs, — Leonardo 
and Michael Angelo, Ghirlandajo and Masaccio, Titian and 
Tintoret. But I speak of the Renaissance as an evil time, 
becau.se, when it saw those men go burning forth into the 
battle, it mistook their armor for their strength ; and forth- 
with encumbered with the painful panoply every striplmg 
who ought to have gone forth only with his own choice of three 
smaU stones out of the brook. 

Over the greater part of the surface of the world, we find 
that a rock has been providentially distributed, in a manner 
particularly pointing it out as intended for the service of man. 
Not altogether a common rock, it is yet rare enough to command 
a certain degree of interest and attention wherever it is foimd ' 
but not so rare as to preclude its use for any purpose to which 
it is fitted. It is exactly of the consistence which is best 
adapted for sculpture ; that is to say, neither hard nor brittle, 
nor flaky nor splintery, but uniform, and dehcately, yet not 
ignobly soft — exactly soft enough to allow the sculptor to 



182 ABCHITECTUEE. 

work it without force, and trace on it the finest hnes of 
finished forms ; and yet so hard as never to hetray the touch 
or moulder away beneath the steel ; and so admirably crystal- 
hzed, and of such permanent elements, that no rains dissolve 
it, no time changes it, no atmosphere decomposes it; once 
shaped, it is shaped for ever, unless subjected to actual vio- 
lence or attrition. This rock, then, is prepared by Nature for 
the sculptor and architect, just as paper is prepared by the 
manufacturer for the artist, with as great — nay, with greater — 
care, and more perfect adaptation of the material to the require- 
ments. And of this marble paper, some is white and some 
colored ; but more is colored than white, because the white is 
evidently meant for sculpture, and the colored for the covering 
of large surfaces. Now if we would take Nature at her word, 
and use this precious paper which she has taken so much care 
to provide for us (it is a long process, the making of that 
paper ; the pulp of it needed the subtlest possible solution, and 
the pressing of it — for it is all hot pressed — having to be done 
under the sea, or under somethuig at least as heavy) ; if, I say, 
we use it as Nature would have us, consider what advantages 
would follow. 

The colors of marble are mingled for us just as if on a pre- 
pared palette. They are of all shades and hues (except bad 
ones), some being united and even, some broken, mixed, and 
interrupted, in order to supply, as far as possible, the want of 
the painter's power of breaking and mingling the color with 
the brush. But there is more in the colors than this delicacy 
of adaptation. There is history in them. By the manner in 
which they are arranged in every piece of marble, they record 
the means by which that marble has been produced, and the 
successive changes through which it has passed. And in all 
their veins and zones, and flame-like stainings, or broken and 



THE RENAISSANCE. 183 

disconnected lines, they wiite various legends, never untrue, 
of the former poHtical state of the mountain kingdom to which 
they belonged, of its infirmities and fortitudes, convulsions 
and consolidations, from the beginning of time. 



|]ttrt 4. 



" My friend, all speech and humor is short lived, foolish, untrue. Genuine 
work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal 

" Take courage, then — raise the arm — strike home and that right lustilj' — 
the citadel of Hope must yield to noble desire, tlius seconded by noble 
efforts" 



I3art 4. 

SCULPTURE. 

Abchitecttjee is the work of nations ; but we cannot have 
nations of great sculptors. Every house in every street of 
every city ought to be good architecture, but we cannot have 
Flaxman or Thorwaldsen at work upon it, nor if we choose 
only to devote ourselves to our public buildings, could the 
mass and majority of them be great, if we requii-ed all to be 
executed by gi'eat men ; greatness is not to be had in the 
required quantity. Giotto may design a Campanile, but he 
cannot carve it, he can only carve one or two of the bas-re- 
liefs at the base of it. And with every increase of your fasti- 
diousness in the execution of your ornament, you diminish the 
possible number and grandeur of your buUdings. Do not 
think you can educate your workmen, or that the demand for 
perfection will increase the supply ; educated imbecility and 
finessed foolishness are the worst of all imbecilities and fool- 
ishnesses, and there is no free-trade measure which will ever 
lower the price of brains, — there is no California of common 
sense. 

Suppose one of those old Ninevite or Egyjitian builders, 
with a couple of thousand men — mud-bred, onion-eating 
creatures, under him, to be set to work, like so many ants, 
on his temple sculptures. What is he to do with them ? He 
can jDut them through a granitic exercise of current hand ; he 
can teach them all how to curl hair thoroughly into croche- 



188 SaULPTUBE. 

coeurs, as you teach a bench of school-boys how to shape pot 
hooks ; he can teach them all how to draw long eyes and 
straight noses, and how to copy accurately certain well-de- 
fined lines. Then he fits his own great designs to their 
capacities ; he takes out of king, or lion, or god, as much as 
was expressible by croche-coeurs and granitic pothooks; he 
throws this into noble forms of his own imagining, and having 
mapped out their lines so that there can be no possibility of 
error, sets his two thousand men to work upon them, with a 
will and so many onions a day. 

Those times cannot now return. We have, with Chris- 
tianity, recognised the individual value of every soul; and 
there is no intelligence so feeble but that its single ray may 
in some sort contribute to the general hght. 

It is foolish to carve what is to be seen forty yards off with 
the dehcacy which the eye demands within two yards ; not 
merely because it is lost in the distance, but because it is a 
great deal worse than lost ; the delicate work has actually 
worse effect in the distance than rough work. 

We may be asked, whether in advocating this adaptation to 
the distance of the eye, I obey my adopted rules of observance 
of natural law. Are not all natural things, it may be asked, 
as lovely near as fiir away? Nay, not so. Look at the 
clouds, and watch the delicate sculpture of their alabaster 
sides, and the rounded lustre of their magnificent roUing. 
They are meant to be beheld far away ; they were shaped for 
their place, high above your head ; approach them, and they 
fuse into vague mists, or whirl away in fierce fragments of 
"^-thunderous vapor. / Look at the crest of the Alp, from the 
far-away plams over which the light is cast, whence human 
souls have commvmion with it by their myriads. The child 
looks up to it in the dawn, and the husbandman in the burden 



SCULPTURE. 185 

and heat of the day, ana the old man in the going down of 
the sun, and it is to them all as the celestial city on the 
world's horizon ; dyed with the depths of heaven, and clothed 
with the calm of eternity. There was it set, for holy domi- 
nion, by Him who marked for the sun his journey, and bade 
the moon know her going down. It was built for its place in 
the far-off sky ; approach it, and as the sound of the voice of 
man dies away about its foundations, and the tide of human 
life, shallowed upon the vast arid shore, is at last met by the 
Eternal "Here shall thy proud waves be stayed," the glory 
of its aspect fades into blanched fearfulness ; its purple walls 
are rent into grisly rocks, its silver fretwork saddened into 
wasting snow ; the storm-brands of ages are on its breast, the 
ashes of its own ruin lie solemnly on its white raiment. 

Now it is indeed true that where nature loses one kind of 
beauty, as you approach it, she substitutes another ; this is 
worthy of her infinite poAver, and art can sometimes follow her 
even in doing this. Take a singular and marked instance. 
When the sun rises behind a ridge of pines, and those pines 
are seen from a distance of a mile or two ; against his light, 
the whole form of the tree, trunk, branches, and all becomes 
one frostwork of intensely brilliant sUver, which is relieved 
against the day sky like a burning fringe, for some distance 
on either side of the sun ! Shakspeare and "Wordsworth have 
noticed this. Shakspeare in Richard II. : — 

'• But when, from under this terrestrial ball, 
He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines." 

And Wordsworth, in one of his minor poems, on leaving 
Italy :— 

My thoughts become bright, like yon edging of pines ; 

On the steep's lofty verge, how it blackened the air. 
But touched from behind by the sun, it now shines 

With threads that set in part of his own silver hair. 



190 scuLrruBE, 

Now, suppose one who had never seen pines, were, Ic r the 
first time in his life, to see them under this strange aspect, and, 
reasoning as to the means by which such effect could be pro- 
duced, laboriously to approach the eastern ridge, how would 
he be amazed to find that the fiery spectres had been jH'oduced 
by trees with swarthy and grey trunks, and dark green leaves ! 
"We in our simplicity, if we had been required to produce 
such an appearance, should have built up trees of chased sil- 
ver, with trunks of glass, and then been grievously amazed to 
find that, at two mUes off, neither silver nor glass were any 
more visible ; but Nature knew better, and prepared for her 
fairy work with the strong branches and dark leaves, in her 
own mysterious way. 

Now this is exactly what you have to do with your good 
ornament. It may be tha-t it is capable of being apjaroached, 
as well as likely to be seen far away, and then it ought to 
have microscopic qualities, as the pine leaves have, which will 
bear approach. But your calculation of its purpose is for a 
glory to be produced at a given distance. 

All noble ornament is the expression of man's delight in 
God's work. 

The function of ornament is to make you happy. Now, in 
what are you rightly happy ? Not in thinking what you have 
done yourself; not in your own pride ; not in your own birth; 
not in your own being, or your own will, but in looking at 
God ; Avatching what He does, what He is ; and obeying His 
law, and yielding yourself to His will. 

You are to be made happy by ornamer ts ; therefore they 
must be the expression of all this. 

[Then the proper material of ornamei/t will be whatever 
G 3d has created ; and its proper treatment, that which seems 
in accordance with, or symbolical of, his laws. And, for mate- 
vial, As^e shall therefore have, first, tlie abstract lines which are 



SCULPTURE. 191 

most frequent in nature ; and then, from lower to higher, the 
whole range of systematized inorganic and organic forms 
We shall rapidly glance in order at their kinds, and however 
absurd the elemental division of inorganic matter by the 
ancients may seem to the modern chemist, it is so grand and 
simple for arrangement of external appearances, that I shall 
here follow it ; noticing first, after Abstract Lines, the inimi- 
table forms of the four elements, of Earth, Water, Fire, and 
Air, and then those of animal organisms. 

It may be convenient to have the order stated in succession, 
thus : — 

1. Abstract Lines. 

2. Forms of Earth (Crystals). 

3. Forms of Water (Waves). 

4. Fonns of Fire (Flames and Rays). 

5. Forms of Air (Clouds). 

6. Organic Forms. Shells. 

7. Fish. 

8. Reptiles and Insects. 

9. Vegetation. Stems and Trunks. 

10. Vegetation. Foliage, Flowers, and Fruit. 

11. Birds. 

12. Mammalian Animals and Man. 

We find, at the close of the sixteenth century, the arts of 
painting and sculpture wholly devoted to entertain the indolent 
and satiate the luxurious. To efiect these noble ends, they 
took a thousand different forms ; painting, however, of course 
being the most complying, aiming sometimes at mere amuse- 
ment by deception in landscapes, or minute imitation of natural 
objects ; sometimes giving more piquant excitement in battle- 
pieces full of slaughter, or revels deep in drunkenness ; some- 
times entering u^ion serious subjects, for the sake of grotesque 



192 SCULPTURE. 

fiends and picturesque infernos, or that it might introduce 
pretty children as clierubs, and handsome women as Magdalenes 
and Maries of Egypt, or portraits of patrons in the character 
of the more decorous saints ; but more frequently, for direct 
flatteries of this kind, recurring to Pagan mythology, and 
painting frail ladies as goddesses or graces, and foolish kings in 
radiant apotheosis ; while, for the earthly delight of the persons 
whom it honored as divine, it ransacked the records of luscious 
fable, and brought back, in fullest depth of dye and flame of 
fancy, the impurest dreams of the un-Christian ages, 

Meanwhile, the ait of sculpture, less capable of ministering 
to mere amusement, was more or less reserved for the affecta- 
tions of taste ; and the study of the classical statues introduced 
various ideas on the subjects of "purity,", "chastity," and 
" dignity," such as it was possible for people to entertain who 
were themselves impure, luxurious, and ridiculous. It is a 
matter of extreme difficulty to explain the exact character of 
this modem sculpturesque ideal ; but its relation to the true 
ideal may be best understood by considering it as in exact 
parallelism with the relation of the word "taste" to the word 
" love." Wherever the word " taste" is used with respect to 
matters of art, it indicates either that the thing spoken of 
belongs to some inferior class of objects, or that the person 
speaking has a false conception of its nature. For, consider 
the exact sense in which a work of art is said to be " in good 
or bad taste." It does not mean that it is true or false ; that 
it is beautiful or ugly ; but that it does or does not comply 
either with the laws of choice, which are enforced by certain 
modes of life ; or the habits of mind produced by a particular 
sort of education. It does not mean merely fashionable, that 
is, complying with a momentary caprice of the upper classes ; 
but it means agreeing with the habitual sense which the most 
refined education, common to those upper classes at the period 



SCULPTURE. 193 

gives to their whole mind. Now, therefore, so far as that 
aducation does indeed tend to make the senses delicate, and the 
perceptions accurate, and thus enables people to be pleased 
with quiet instead of gaudy color, and with graceful instead of 
coarse form ; and, by long acquaintance with the best things, 
to discern quickly what is fine from what is common ; — so far, 
acquired taste is an honorable faculty, and it is true praise of 
anything to say it is "in good taste." But so far as this 
higher education has a tendency to narrow the sympathies and 
harden the heart, diminishing the interest of all beautiful 
things by familiarity, until even what is best can hardly please, 
and what is brightest hardly entertain ; — so far as it fosters 
pride, and leads men to found the pleasure they take in any- 
thing, not on the worthiness of the thing, but on the degree in 
which it indicates some greatness of their own (as people build 
marble porticos, and inlay marble floors, not so much because 
they like the colors of marble, or find it pleasant to the foot, as 
because such porches and floors are costly, and separated in all 
human eyes from plain entrances of stone and timber) ; — so far 
as it leads people to prefer gracefulness of dress, manner, and 
aspect, to value of substance and heart, liking a well said thing 
better than a true thing, and a well trained manner better than 
a sincere one, and a delicately formed face better than a good- 
natured one, and in all other ways and things setting custom 
and semblance above everlasting truth ; — so far, finally, as it 
induces a sense of inherent distinction between class and class, 
and causes everything to be more or less despised which has 
no social rank, so that the afiection, pleasure, or grief of a cloAvn 
are looked upon as of no interest compared with the afiection 
and grief of a well-bred man ; — just so far, in all these several . 
ways, the feeling induced by \\ hat is called a "liberal education" < 
IS utterly adverse to the understanding of noble art ; and the 
name which is given to the feeling, — Taste, Goftt, Gusto, — in 

9 



iy4 SCULFl'UEE. 

all languages, indicates the baseness of it, for it imp ies that art 
gives only a kind of pleasure analogous to that derived from 
eating by the palate. 

Modern education, not in art only, but in all other things 
referable to the same standard, has invariably given taste in 
this bad sense ; it has given fastidiousness of choice without 
judgment, superciliousness of manner without dignity, refine- 
ment of habit without pui'ity, grace of expression without 
sincerity, and desire of loveliness without love; and the 
modern " Ideal" of high art is a curious mingling of the grace- 
fulness and reserve of the drawing-room with a certain me i- 
sure of classical sensuality. Of this last element, and t\ie 
singular artifices by which vice succeeds in combining it with 
what appears to be pure and severe, it would take us long to 
reason fully ; I would rather leave the reader to follow out 
for himself the consideration of the influence, in this direction, 
of statues, bronzes, and paintings, as at present employed by 
the upper circles of London, and (especially) Paris ; and this 
not so much in the works which are really fine, as in the mul- 
tiplied coarse copies of them ; taking the widest range, from 
Dannaeker's Ariadne down to the amorous shepherd and shep- 
herdess in china on the drawing room time-piece, rigidly ques- 
tioning in each case, how far the charm of the art does indeed 
depend on some appeal to the inferior passions. Let it be 
considered, for instance, exactly how far the value of a picture 
of a girl's head by Greuze would be lowered in the market, if 
the dross, which now leaves the bosom bare, were raised to 
the neck ; and how far, in the commonest lithograph of some 
utterly popular subject, — for instance, the teaching of Uncle 
Tom by Eva — the sentiment which is supposed to be excited 
by the exhibition of Christianity in youth is complicated with 
that which depends upon Eva's having a dainty foot and a 
well-made satin slipper ; and then, having completely deter 



SCULPTURE. 195 

mined for himself how far the element exists, consider farther, 
Avhether, when art is thus frequent (for frequent he Avill assu- 
redly find it to be) in its appeal to the lower passions, it is 
likely to attain the highest order of merit, or be judged by 
the truest standards of judgment. For, of all the causes 
which have combined, in modern times, to lower the rank of 
art, I believe this to be one of the most fatal ; while, recipro- 
cally, it may be questioned how far society suffers, in its turn, 
from the influences possessed over it by the arts it has 
degraded. It seems to me a subject of the very deepest inter- 
est to determine what has been the effect upon the European 
nations of the great change by which art became again capa- 
ble of ministering delicately to the lower passions, as it had in 
the worst days of Rome ; how far, indeed, in all ages, the fall 
of nations may be attributed to art's arriving at this particular 
stage among them. I do not mean that, in any of its stages, 
it is incapable of being employed for evil, but that assuredly 
an Egyptian, Spartan, or Norman was unexposed to the kind 
of temptation which is continually offered by the delicate 
painting and sculpture of modern days; and, although the 
diseased imagination might complete the perfect image of 
beauty from the colored image on the wall,* or the most 
revolting thoughts be suggested by the mocking barbarism of 
the Gothic sculpture, their hard outline and rude execution 
Avere free from all the subtle treachery which now fills the 
flushed canvass and the rounded marble. 

I cannot, however, pxirsue this inquiry here. For our pre- 
sent purpose it is enough to note that the feeling, in itself so 
debased, branches upwards into that of which, while no one 
has cause to be ashamed, no one, on the other hand, has cause 
to be proud, namely, the admiration of physical beauty in the 
human form, a*^ distinguished from expression of character. 

* Ezek. xxiil 14. 



196 SCuLPTUKE. 

Every one can easily appreciate the merit of regular features 
and well-formed limbs, but it requires some attention, sympa- 
thy, and sense, to detect the charm of j)assing expression, or 
life-disciplined character. The beauty of the Apollo Belvidere, 
or Venus de Medicis, is perfectly palpable to any shallow fine 
lady or fine gentleman, though they would have perceived 
none in the face of an old weather-beaten St. Peter, or a grey- 
haired " Grandmother Lois." The knowledge that long study 
is necessary to produce these regular types of the human form 
renders the facile admiration matter of eager self-complacency ; 
the shallow spectator, delighted that he can really, and with- 
out hypocrisy, admire what required much thought to pro- 
duce, supposes himself endowed with the highest critical facul- 
ties, and easily lets himself be carried into rhapsodies about the 
"ideal," which, when all is said, if they be accurately exa- 
mined, will be found literally to mean notliing more than 
that the figure has got handsome calves to its legs, and a 
straight nose. 

That they do mean, in reality, nothing more than this may be 
easily ascertained by watching the taste of the same persons in 
other things. The fashionable lady who will write five or six 
pages in her diary respecting the eifect upon her mind of such 
and such an " ideal " in marble, Avill have her drawing-room 
table covered with Books of Beauty, in which the engravings 
represent the human form in every possible aspect of distortion 
and afiectation; and the connoisseur who, in the morning, 
pretends to the most exquisite taste in the antique, will be seen, 
in the evening, in his opera-stall, applauding the least graceful 
gestures of the least modest figurante. 

But even this vulgar pursuit of physical beauty (vulgar in 
the profoundest sense, for there is no vulgarity like the vulgarity 
of education) would be less contemptible if it really succeeded 
in its object ; but, like all pursuits carried to inordinate length, 



SCULPTURE. 191 

it defeats itself. Physical beauty is a noble thing when it is seen 
in perfectness ; but the manner in which the moderns pursue 
their ideal prevents their ever really seeing what they are 
always seeking ; for, requu-ing that all forms should be regular 
and faultless, they permit, or even compel, their painters and 
sculptors to work chiefly by rule, altering then- models to fit 
then- preconceived notions of Avhat is right. When such artists 
look at a face, they do not give it the attention necessary to 
discern what beauty is already in its peculiar features ; but 
only to see how best it may be altered into something for 
which they have themselves laid down the laws. Nature never 
unveils her beauty to such a gaze. She keeps whatever she has 
done best, close sealed, until it is regarded with reference. 
To the painter who honors her, she will open a revelation in the 
face of a street mendicant ; but in the work of the painter who 
alters her, she will make Portia become ignoble and Perdita 
graceless. 

Nor is the effect less for evil on the mind of the general 
observer. The lover of ideal beauty, with all his conceptions 
narrowed by rule, never looks carefully enough upon the fea- 
tm-es which do not come under his law (or any others), to dis- 
cern the inner beauty in them. The strange intricacies about 
the lines of the lips, and marvellous shadows and watchfires of 
the eye, and wavering traceries of the eyelash, and infinite 
modulations of the brow, wherein high humanity is embodied, 
are all invisible to him. He finds himself driven back at last, 
with all his idealism, to the lionne of the ball-room, whom youth 
and passion can as easily distinguish as his utmost critical 
science ; whereas, the observer who has accustomed himself to 
take human faces as God made them, will often find as much 
beauty on a village green as in the proudest room of state, and 
as much in the free seats of a church aisle, as in all the sacred 
pauitings of the Vatican or the Pitti. 



198 SCULPTUKE. 

The difference in the accuracy of the lines of the Torso of 
the Vatican (the Maestro of M. Angelo) from those in one 
of M. Angelo's finest works, could perhaps scarcely be appre- 
ciated by any eye or feeling undisciplined by the most perfect 
and practical anatomical knowledge. It rests on points of 
such traceless and refined delicacy, that though we feel them 
in the result, we cannot follow them in the details. Yet they 
are such and so great as to place the Torso alone in art, soli- 
tary and supreme; while the finest of M. Angelo's works» 
considered with respect to truth alone, are said to be only on 
a level with antiques of the second class, under the Apollo 
and Venus, that is, two classes or grades below the Torso. 
But suppose the best sculptor in the world, possessing the 
most entire appreciation of the excellence of the Torso, were 
to sit down, pen in hand, to try and tell us wherein the pecu- 
liar truth of each line consisted ? Could any words that he 
could use make us feel the hairbreadth of depth and distance 
on which all depends? or end in anything more than bare 
assertions of the inferiority of this line to that, which, if we 
did not perceive for ourselves, no explanation could ever illus- 
trate to us ? He might as well endeavor to explain to us by 
words some taste or other subject of sense, of which we had 
no experience. And so it is with all truths of the highest 
order ; they are separated from those of average precision by 
points of extreme delicacy, which none but the cultivated eye 
can in the least feel, and to express which, all words are abso- 
lutely meaningless and useless. So far as the sight and know- 
ledge of the human form, of the purest race, exercised from 
infancy constantly, but not excessively, in all exercises of dig- 
nity, not in twists and straining dexterities, but in natural 
exercises of running, casting, or riding; practised in endu- 
rance, not of extraordinary hardship, for that hardens and 
degrades the body, but of natural hardship, vicissitudes of 



SCULPTURE. 199 

wmt(,T and summer, and cold and heat, yet in a climate where 
none of these are severe ; surrounded also by a certain degree 
of right luxury, so as to soften and refine the forms of strength ; 
so far as the sight of this could render the mental intelHgence 
of what is right in human form so acute as to be able to 
abstract and combine from the best examples so produced, 
that which was most perfect in each, so far the Greek con 
ceived and attained the ideal of bodily form. 

Form we find abstractedly considered by the sculptor ; how 
far it would be possible to advantage a statue by the addition 
of color, I venture not to affirm ; the question is too exten- 
sive to be here discussed. High authorities and ancient prac- 
tice, are in favor of color ; so the sculpture of the middle ages : 
the two statues of Mino da Fiesole m the church of St^. Cate- 
rina at Pisa have been colored, the irises of the eyes painted 
dark, and the hair gilded, as also I think the Madonna in St*^. 
Maria della Spina ; the eyes have been painted in the sculp- 
tures of Orcagna in Or San Michcle, but it looks like a rem- 
nant of barbarism, (compare the pulpit of Guida da Como, in 
the church of San Bartolomeo at Pistoja,) and I have never 
seen color on any solid forms, that did not, to my mind, neu- 
trahze all other power ; the porcelains of Luca della Robbia 
are painful examples, and in lower art, Florentine mosaic in 
relief; gilding is more admissible, and tells sometimes sweetly 
upon figures of quaint design, as on the pulpit of St^. Maria 
Novella, whUe it spoils the classical ornaments of the mould- 
ings. But the truest grandeur of sculpture I believe to be in 
the white form. 

It was said by Michael Angelo that " non ha I'ottimo scul- 
tore alcim concetto, Ch'un marmo solo in se non circoscriva," 
a sentence which, though in the immediate sense intended by 
the writer it may remind us a little of the indignation of Boi^ 



200 SCULPTURE, 

lean's Pluto, " II s'ensuit cle la que tout ce qui se peut dire de 
beau, est dans les dictionnaires, — il n'y a que les paroles qui 
sont transposees," yet is valuable, because it shows us that 
Michael Angelo held the imagination to be entirely expressible 
in rock, and therefore altogether independent, in its own 
nature, of those aids of color and shade by which it is recom- 
mended in Tintoret, though the sphere of its operation is of 
course by these incalculably extended. But the presence of 
the imagination may be rendered in marble as deep, thrilling, 
and awful as in painting, so that the sculptor seek for the soul 
and govern the body thereby. 

Of unimaginative work, Bandinelli and Canova supply 
us with characteristic instances of every kind, the Hercules 
and Cacus of the former, and its criticism by Cellini, wUl occur 
at once to every one ; the disgusting statue now placed so as 
to conceal Giotto's important tempera picture in Santa Croce 
is a better instance, but a still more important lesson might be 
received by comparing the inanity of Canova's garland grace, 
and ball-room sentiment with the intense truth, tenderness, 
and power of men like Mino da Fiesole, whose chisel leaves 
many a hard edge, and despises down and dimple, but it 
seems to cut light and carve breath, the marble burns beneath 
it, and becomes transparent with very sjiirit. Yet Mino 
stopped at the human nature ; he saw the soul, but not the 
ghostly presences about it ; it was reserved for Michael An- 
gelo to pierce deeper yet, and to see the indwelling angels. 
No man's soul is alone : Laocoon or Tobit, the serpent has it 
by the heart or the angel by the hand, the light or the fear of 
the spiritual things that move beside it may be seen on the body; 
and that bodily form with Buonaroti, white, solid, distinct ma- 
terial, though it be, is invariably felt as the instrument or the 
habitation of some infinite, invisible power. The earth of the 
Sistine Adam that begins to burn : the woman embodied burst 



SCULPTURE. 20i 

of adoration from his sleep ; the twelve great torrents of the 
Spirit of God that pause above us there, urued in their vessels 
of clay; the waiting in the shadow of futurity of those 
through whom the promise and presence of God went down 
from the Eve to the Mary, each still and fixed, fixed in his 
expectation, silent, foreseeuig, faithful, seated each on his 
stony throne, the building stones of the word of God, build- 
ing on and on, tier by tier, to the Refused one, the head of 
the corner ; not only these, not only the troops of terror 
torn up from the earth by the four quartered wmds of the 
Judgment, but every fi-agment and atom of stone though 
compelled to represent the Smai under conventional form, m 
order that the receivmg of the tables might be seen at the 
top of it, yet so soon as it is possible to give more truth, he is 
ready with it ; he takes a grand fold of horizontal cloud 
straight from the flanks of the Alps, and shows the forests of 
the mountains through its misty volume, like sea-weed through 
deep sea. Nevertheless when the realization is impossible, bold 
symbolism is of the highest value, and in religious art, as we 
shall presently see, even necessary, as of the rays of light in the 
Titian woodcut of St. Francis before noticed ; and sometimes 
the attention is directed by some such strange form to the mean- 
ing of the image, which may be missed if it remains in its natu- 
ral purity, (as, I suppose, few in looking at the Cephalus and 
Procris of Turner, note the sympathy of those faint rays that 
are just drawing back and dying between the trunks of the 
far-off forest, with the ebbing life of the nymph ; unless, in- 
deed, they happen to recollect the same sympathy marked by 
Shelley in the Alastor ;) but the imagination is not shown in 
any such modifications ; however, in some cases they may be 
valuable (in the Cephalus they would be utterly destructive), 
and I note them merely m consequence of then* peculiar use 
in religious art, presently to be examined. 

9* 



/:^202 SCULPTURE. 

The last mode we have here to note, ha wliicli the imagina- 
tion regardant may be expressed in art is exaggeration, of 
which, as it is the vice of all bad artists, and may be constantly 
resorted to without any warrant of imagination, it is necessary 
to note strictly the admissible limits. 

By comparing the disgusting convulsions of the Laocoon, 
Avith the Elgin Theseus, we may obtain a general idea of the 
effect of the influence, as shown by its absence in one, and 
presence in the other, of two works which, as far as artistical 
merit is concerned, are in some measure parallel, not that I 
believe, even in this respect, the Laocoon justitiably comparable 
with the Theseus. I suppose that no group has exercised so 
pernicious an influence on art as this, a subject ill chosen, 
meanly conceived and unnaturally treated, recommended to 
imitation by subtleties of execution and accumulation of tech- 
nical knowledge. 

I would also have the reader compare with the meagre lines 
and contemptible tortures of the Laocoon, the awfulness and 
quietness of M. Angelo's treatment of a subject in most respects 
similar, (the plague of the Fiery Serpents,) but of which the 
choice was justified both by the place which the event holds in 
the typical system he had to arrange, and by the grandeur of 
the plague itself, in its multitudinous grasp, and its mystical 
salvation ; sources of sublimity entirely wanting to the slaughter 
of the Dardan priest. It is good to see how his gigantic intellect 
reaches after repose, and truthfully finds it, in the falling hand 
of the near figure, and in the deathful decline of that whose 
hands are held up even in their venomed coldness to the cross;/ 
and though irrelevant to our present purpose, it is well also to 
note how the grandeur of this treatment results, not merely 
from choice, but from a greater knowledge and more faithful 
rendering of truth. For whatever knowledge of the human 
frame there may be in the Laocoon, there is certainly none of 



SCLLPTUEE- 20S 

the habits of serpents. The fixing of the snake's head in the 
side of the prmcipal figure is as false to nature, as it is poor 
in comiJosition of line. A large serpent never wants to bite, it 
wants to hold, it seizes therefore always where it can hold best, 
by the extremities or throat, it seizes once and for ever, and 
that before it coils, following up the seizure Avith the twist of 
its body round the victim, as invisibly swift as the twist of a 
whip lash round any hard object it may strike, and then it 
holds fast, never moving the jaws or the body ; if its prey has 
any j^oAver of struggling left, it throws round another coU, 
without quitting the hold with the jaws ; if Laocoon had had 
to do with real serpents, instead of pieces of tape with heads 
to them, he would have been held still, and not allowed to 
throw his arms or legs about. It is most instructive to observe 
the accuracy of Michael Angelo in the rendering of these cir- 
cumstances; the bmding of the arms to the body, and the 
knotting of the whole mass of agony together, until we hear the 
crashing of the bones beneath the grisly sliding of the engine 
folds. Note also the expression in all the figures of another 
circumstance, the torpor and cold numbness of the lunbs 
induced by the serpent venom, which, though justifiably over- 
looked by the sculptor of the Laocoon, as well as by Virgil — 
in consideration of the rapidity of the death by crushing, adds 
infinitely to the power of the Florentine's conception, and would 
have been better hinted by Virgil, than that sickening distri- 
bution of venom on the gai-lands. In fact, Virgil has missed 
both of truth and impressiveness every way — the "morsu 
depascitur" is unnatural butchery — ^the "perfusus veneno" 
gratuitous foulness — the "clamores hoi-rendos," impossible 
degradation ; compare carefully the remarks on this statue in 
Sir Charles Bell's Essay on Expression, (third edition, p. 192,) 
where he has most wisely and uncontrovertibly deprived the 
statue of all claim to expression of energy and fortitude of 



204 SCULi'lLKE. 

mind, and shown its common and coarse intent of mere bodily 
exertion and agony, while he has confirmed Payne Knight's 
just condemnation of the passage in Virgil. 

If the reader wishes to see the opposite or imaginative view 
of the subject, let him compare Winkelmann ; and Schiller,/ 
Letters on Esthetic Culture. 

Whenever, in monumental work, the sculptor reaches a 
deceptive appearance of life or death, or of concomitant details, 
he has gone too far. The statue should be felt for such, not 
look like a dead or sleeping body ; it should not convey the 
impression of a corpse, nor of sick and outwearied flesh, but it 
should be the marble image of death or weariness. So the 
concomitants should be distmctly marble, severe and monu- 
mental in their lines, not shroud, not bedclothes, no^ actual 
armor nor brocade, not a real soft pillow, not a downright hard 
stufied mattress, but the mere type and suggestion of these : 
a certain rudeness and incompletion of finish is very noble in 
all. Not that they are to be unnatural, such hues as are given 
should be jiure and true, and clear of the hardness and mannered 
rigidity of the strictly Gothic types, but Ihies so few and grand 
as to appeal to the imagination only, and always to stop short 
of realization. There is a monument put up lately by a modern 
Italian sculptor in one of the side chapels of Santa Croce, the 
face fine and the execution dexterous. But it looks as if the 
person had been restless all night, and the artist admitted to a 
faithful study of the disturbed bedclothes in die morning. 

No herculean form is spiritual, for it is degrading the spiri- 
tual creature to suppose it operative through impulse of bone 
and sinew; its power is immaterial and constant, neither 
dependent on, nor developed by exertion. Generally, it is w^ell 
to conceal anatomical development as far as may be; even 
Michael Angelo's anatomy interferes with his divinity; in the 



SCULPTUKE. 205 

hands of lower men the angel becomes a preparation. How 
far it is possible to subdue or geueralize the naked lurni I 
venture not to afrirm, but I believe that it is best to conceal it 
as far as may be, not with draperies light and undulating, that 
fall in with, and 'exhibit its principal lines, but with draperies 
severe and linear, such as were constantly employed before the 
time of Raftaelle, I recollect no single instance of a naked 
angel that does not look boylike or childlike, and unspiritual- 
ized ; even Fra Bartolomeo's might Avith advantage be spared 
from the pictures at Lucca, and in the hands of inferior men, 
the sky is merely encumbered with sprawling infants ; those of 
Domenichino in the Madonna del Rosario, and Martyrdom of 
St. Agnes, are peculiarly offensive, studies of bare-legged 
children howling and kicking in volumes of smoke. Confusion 
seems to exist in the minds of subsequent painters between 
Angels and Cupids. 

The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the 
common observer of life and nature. Yet the sculptor is not, 
for this reason, permitted to be wanting either in knowledge 
or expression of anatomical detail ; and the more refined that 
expression can be rendered, the more perfect is his work. 
That which, to the anatomist, is the end, — is, to the sculptor, 
the means. The former desires details, for their own sake ; 
the latter, that by means of them, he may kindle his work 
with life, and stamp it with beauty. 

A colossal statiie is necessarily no more an exaggeration of 
what it represents than a miniature is a diminution ; it need not 
be a representation of a giant, but a representation, on a large 
scale, of a man ; only it is to be observed, that as any plane 
intersecting the cone of rays between us and the object, must 
receive an image smaller than the object ; a .small image is 
rationally and completely expressive of a lai-ger one ; but not 
a large of a small one. Hence I think that all statues above 



206 SCULPTUKE. 

the Elgin standard, or that of Michael Angelo's Night and 
Morning, are, ui a measure, taken by the eye for representa- 
tions of giants, 

Michael Angelo was once commanded by Pietro di Medici to 
mould a statue out of snow, and he obeyed the command. I am 
glad, and we have all reason to be glad, that such a fancy ever 
came into the mind of the unworthy prince, and for this cause : 
that Pietro di Medici then gave, at the period of one great 
epoch of consummate power in the arts, the perfect, accurate, 
and intensest possible type of the greatest error which nations 
and princes can commit, resj)ecting the power of genius 
entrusted to their guidance. You had there, observe, the 
strongest genius in the most perfect obedience ; capable of iron 
independence, yet wholly submissive to the patron's will ; at 
once the most highly accomplished and the most original, 
capable of doing as much as man could do, in any direction 
that man could ask. And its governor, and guide, and patron 
sets it to build a statue in snow — to put itself into the service 
of annihilation — to make a cloud of itself, anl pass away from ) 
the earth. 

Now this, so precisely and completely done by Pietro di 
Medici, is what Ave are all doing, exactly m the degree in which 
we du'ect the genius under our patronage to woi-k in more or 
less perishable materials. So far as we induce painters to work 
in fading colors, or architects to build with imperfect structure, 
or in any other way consult only uumediate ease and cheapness 
in the production of what we want, to the exclusion of provident 
thought as to its permanence and serviceableness in after ages ; 
so far we are forcing our Michael Angelos to carve in snow. 
The first duty of the economist in art is, to see that no 
intellect shall thus glitter merely in the manner of hoar-frost ; 
but that it shall be well vitrified, like a painted window, and 



SCULPTURE. 207 

shall be set so between shafts of stone and bands of iron, 
that it shall bear the sunshine upon it, and send the sunshine 
through it from generation to generation. 

How are we to get our men of genius : that is to say, by 
what means may we produce among us, at any given time, the 
greatest quantity of effective art-intellect ? A wide question, 
you say, involving an account of all the best means of art 
education. Yes, but I do not mean to go into the consideration 
of those ; I want only to state the few principles which lie at 
the foundation of the matter. Of these, the first is that you 
have always to find your artist, not to make him ; you can't 
manufacture him, any more than you can manufacture gold. 
You can find him, and refine him : you dig him out as he lies 
nugget-fashion in the mountain-stream ; you bring him home ; 
and you make him into current coin, or household plate, but 
not one grain of him can you originally produce. A certain 
quantity of art-intellect is born annually in every nation, greater 
or less accordmg to the nature and cultivation of the nation, or 
race of men ; but a perfectly fixed quantity annually, not 
increasable by one grain. You may lose it, or you may gather 
it ; you may let it lie loose in the ravine, and buried in the 
sands, or you may make kings' thrones of it, and overlay 
temple gates with it, as you choose ; but the best you can do 
with it is always merely sifting, melting, hammering, purifying 
— never creating. And there is another thing notable about 
this artistical gold; not only is it limited in quantity, but in use. 
/ You need not make thrones or golden gates Avith it unless you 
/ like, but assuredly you can't do anything else with it. You 
can't make knives of it, nor armour, nor railroads. The gold 
Avon't cut you, and it won't carry you ; put it to a mechanical 
use, and you destroy it at once. It is quite true that in the 
greatest artists, their proper artistical faculty is united with 
every other ; and you may make use of the other faculties, and 



208 SCULPTUEE. 

let the artistical one lie dormant. For auglit I know there may 
be two or three Leonardo da Vincis employed at this moment 
in yom- harbors and railroads : but you are not employing 
their Leonardesque or golden faculty there, you are only 
oppressing and destroying it. And the artistical gift in average 
men is not joined with others; your born painter, if you don't 
make a painter of him, won't be a first-rate merchant, or 
lawyer ; at all events, whatever he turns out, his own special 
gift is unemployed by you ; and in no wise helps him in that 
other business. So here you have a certain quantity of a par- 
ticular sort of intelligence, produced for you annually by 
providential laws, which you can only make use of by setting 
it to its own proper work, and which any attempt to use 
otherwise involves the dead loss of so much human energy. 

I believe that much of the best artistical intellect is daily 
lost in other avocations. Generally, the temper which would 
make an admirable artist is humble and observant, capable of 
taking much interest in little things, and of entertaining itself 
pleasantly in the dullest circumstances. Suppose, added to 
these characters, a steady conscientiousness which seeks to do 
its duty wherever it may be placed, and the power, denied to 
few artistical minds, of ingenious invention in almost any pi'acti- 
cal department of human skill, and it can hardly be doubted 
that the very humility and conscientiousness which would have 
perfected the painter, have in many instances prevented his 
becoming one ; and that in the quiet life of our steady crafts- 
men — sagacious manufacturers, and uncomplaining clerks — 
there may frequently be concealed more genius than ever is 
I'aised to the direction of our public works, or to be the mark 
of our public praises. 

Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture, consi. 
dered as a subject of fine art. 



SOULPTUKE. 209 

Now observe. It will at once follow from this principle, 
that a great architect must he a great sculptor or painter. 

This is a universal law. No person who is not a great sculp- 
tor or painter ca)i be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or 
painter, he can only be a builder. 

The three greatest architects hitherto known in the world 
were Phidias, Giotto, and Michael Angelo ; with all of whom, 
architecture was only their play, sculpture and painting their 
w^ork. All great works of architecture in existence are either 
the work of single sculptors or painters, or of societies of sculp- 
tors and painters, acting collectively for a series of years. A 
Gothic cathedral is properly to be defined as a piece of the 
most magnificent associative sculpture, arranged on the noblest 
principles of building, for the service and delight of multitudes ; 
and the proper definition of architecture, as distinguished fi'om 
sculpture, is merely " the art of designing sculpture for a par- 
ticular place, and placing it there on the best principles of 
building." 

Hence it clearly follows, that in modern days we have no 
architects. The term " architecture " is not so much as under- 
stood by us. I am very sorry to be compelled to the dis- 
courtesy of stating this fact, but a fact it is, and a fact which 
it is necessary to state strongly. 



-7^ 



|)art 5. 

p^iNTiisra 



Painting, with all its technicalities, difficulties, and particular ends, is 
nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of 
tho ight, bat by itself nothing. 



|3art 5. 

PAINTING. 
CHAEACTKRlSTIUS OP " GREATNESS OF STYLE " IN PAINTING 

I. Choice of Noble Siibj:^ct.— Greatnesa of style consists 
then : first, in the habitual choice of subjects of thought which 
involve wide interests and profound passions, as opposed to 
those which involve narrow interests and slight passions. The 
style is greater or less in exact proportion to the nobleness of 
the interests and passions involved in the subject. The 
habitual choice of sacred subjects, such as the Nativity, Trans- 
figuration, Crucifixion (if the choice be sincere), implies that 
the painter has a natural disposition to dwell on the highest 
thoughts of which hunlanity is capable ; it constitutes him so 
far forth a painter of tlie highest order, as, for instance, Leo- 
nardo, in his painting of the Last Supper : he who delights in 
representing the acts or meditations of great men, as, for 
instance, Raphael painting the School of Athens, is, so far 
forth, a painter of the second order : he who represents the 
passions and events of ordinary life, of the third. And in this 
ordinary life, he who represents deep thoughts and sorrows, 
as, for instance, Hunt, in his Claudio and Isabella, and such 
other works, is of the highest rank in his sphere ; and he who 
represents the slight malignities and passions of tlie drawing* 
room, as, for instance, Leslie, of the second rank : he who 
represents the sports of boys or simplicities of clowns, as 
Webster or Teniers, of the third rank ; and he who represents 



214 PAINTING. 

brutalities and vices (for delight in tliem, and not for rebuke 
of them), of no rank at all, or rather of a negative rank, hold 
ing a certain order in the abyss. 

The reader will, I hope, understand how much importance 
is to be attached to the sentence in the first parenthesis, " if 
the choice be sincere;" for choice of subject is, of course, only 
available as a criterion of the rank of the painter, when it is 
made from the heart. Indeed, in the lower orders of paint- 
ing, the choice is always made from such heart as the painter 
has ; for his selection of the brawls of peasants or sports of 
children can, of course, proceed only from the fact that he 
has more sympathy with such brawls or pastimes than with 
nobler subjects. But the choice of the higher kind of subjects 
is often insincere ; and may, therefore, afibrd no real criterion 
of the painter's rank. 

It must be remembered, that in nearly all the great periods 
of art the choice of subject has not been left to the painter. 
His employer, — ^abbot, baron, or monarch, — determined for 
him whether he should earn his bread by making cloisters 
bright with choirs of saints, painting coats of arms on leaves 
of romances, or decorating presence-chambers with compli- 
mentary mythology ; and his own personal feelings are ascer 
tainable only by watching, in the themes assigned to 
him, what are the points ia which he seems to take most 
pleasure. 

II. Love of Beauty. — The second characteristic of the 
great school of art is, that it introduces in the conception of its 
subject as much beauty as is possible, consistently with truth.* 

* As here, for the first time, I am obliged to use the terms Truth and 
Beauty in a kind of opposition, I must therefore stop for a moment to 
state clearly the relation of these two qualities of art; and to protest 
against the vulgar and foolish habit of confusing truth and beauty with 
each other. People wit'i shallow powers of thought, desiring to flatter them- 



CHARACTEKISTICS OF " GREATNESS OF STYLE." 215 

For instance, in any subject consisting of a number of 
figures, it will make as many of those figures beautiful as the 

selves with the sensation of having attained profundity, are continually doing 
the most serious mischief by introducing confusion into plain matters, and 
then valuing themselves on being confounded. Nothing is more common 
than to hear people who desire to be thought philosophical, declare that 
" beauty is truth," and "truth is beauty." I would most earnestly beg every 
sensible person who hears such an assertion made, to nip the germinating 
philosopher in his ambiguous bud ; and beg him, if he really believes his own 
assertion, never thenceforward to use two words for the same thing. The 
fact is, truth and beauty are entirely distinct, though often related things. 
One is a property of statements, the other of objects. The statement that 
" two and two make four " is true, but it is neither beautiful nor ugly, for it 
is invisible ; a rose is lovely, but it is neither true nor false, for it is silent. 
That which shows nothing cannot be fair, and that which asserts nothing can- 
not be false. Even the ordinary use of the words false and true as applied to 
artificial and real things, is inaccurate. An artificial rose is not a " false" rose, 
it is not a rose at all. The falseness is in the person who states, or induces 
the belief, that it is a rose. 

Now, therefore, in things concerning art, the words true and false are only 
to be rightly used, while the picture is considered as a statement of facts. 
The painter asserts that this which he has painted is the form of a dog, a man, 
or a tree. If it be not the form of a dog, a man, or a tree, the painter's 
statement is false; and therefore we justly speak of a false line, or false 
color; not that any Une or color can in themselves be false, but they 
become so when they convey a statement that they resemble something 
which they do not resemble. But the beauty of the lines or colors is 
wholly independent of any such statement. They may be beautiful lines, 
though quite inaccurate, and ugly lines though quite faithful. A picture 
may be frightfully ugly, which represents with fidelity some base circum- 
stance of daily life; and a painted window may be exquisitely beautiful, 
which represents men with eagles' faces, and dogs with blue heads and crim- 
son tails (though by the way, this is not in the strict sense false art, as we 
shall see hereafter, inasmuch as it means no assertion that men ever had 
eagles' faces). If this were not so, it would be impossible to sacrifice truth to 
beauty ; for to attain the one would always be to attain the other. But, 
unfortunately, this sacrifice is exceedingly possible, and it is cliiefly this which 



216 PAINTING. 

faithful representation of humanity will admit. It will not 
deny the facts of ugliness or decrepitude, or relative inferior- 
ity and superiority of feature as necessarily manifested in a 
crowd, but it will, so far as it is in its power, seek for and 
dwell upon the fairest forms, and in all things insist on the 
beauty that is in them, not on the ugliness. In this respect, 
schools of art become higher in exact proportion to the degree 
in which they apprehend and love the beautiful. Thus, 
AngeUco, intensely loving all spiritual beauty, will be of the 
highest rank ; and Paul Veronese and Correggio, intensely 
loving physical and corporeal beauty, of the second rank ; and 
Albert Durer, Rubens, and in general the Northern artists 
apparently insensible to beauty, and caring only for truth, 
whether shapely or not, of the third rank ; and Teniers and 
Salvator, Caravaggio, and other such worshippers of the 
depraved, of no rank, or, as we said before, of a certain 
order in the abyss. 

The corruption of the schools of high art, so far as this 
particular quality is concerned, consists in the sacrifice of 
truth to beauty. Great art dwells on all that is beautiful ; but 
false art omits or changes all that is ugly. Great art accepts 
Kature as she is, but directs the eyes and thoughts to what is 
most perfect in her ; false art saves itself the trouble of direc- 
tion by removing or altering whatever it thinks objectionable. 
The evil results of which proceeding are twofold. 

First. That beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts 

characterises the false schools of high art, so far as high art consists in the 
pursuit of beauty. For although truth and beauty are uadependent of each 
other, it does not follow that tve are at liberty to pursue whichever we please. 
They are indeed separable, but it is wrong to separate them ; they are to be 
sought together in the order of their worthiness; that is to say, truth first, 
vind beauty afterwards. High art differs from low art in possessing an excess 
of beauty in addition to its truth, not in possessing an excess of beauty incon 
Bistent witli truth. 



CHARACTERISTICS OF ''GREATNESS OF STYLE." 21 "7 

ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all 
shadow ceases to be enjoyed as light. A white canvass can- 
not produce an effect of sunshine ; the painter must darken it 
in some places before he can make it look lummous in others ; 
nor can an uninterrupted succession of beauty produce the 
true effect of beauty ; it must be foiled by inferiority before 
its own power can be developed. Nature has for the most 
part mingled her inferior and nobler elements as she mingles 
sunshine with shade, giving due use and influence to both, and 
the painter who chooses to remove the shadow, perishes in 
the burning desert he has created. The truly high and beau- 
tiful art of Angelico is continually refreshed and strengthened 
by his frank portraiture of the most ordinary features of his 
brother monks, and of the recorded peculiarities of ungainly 
sanctity ; but the modern German and Raphaelesque schools 
lose all honor and nobleness in barber-like admiration of hand- 
some faces, and have, in fact, no real faith excej^t in straight 
noses and curled hair. Paul Veronese opposes the dwarf to the 
soldier, and the negress to the queen ; Shakspere places Cali- 
ban beside Miranda, and Autolycus beside Perdita ; but the 
vulgar idealist withdraws his beauty to the safety of the 
saloon, and his innocence to the seclusion of the cloister ; he 
pretends that he does this in delicacy of choice and purity of 
sentiment, while in truth he has neither courage to front the 
monster, nor wit enough to furnish the knaA^e. 

It is only by the habit of representing faithfully all things, 
that we can truly learn what is beautiful and what is not. 
Tlie ugliest objects contain some element of beauty ; and in 
all, it is an element peculiar to themselves, which cannot be 
separated from their ugliness, but must either be enjoyed 
together with it, or not at all. The more a painter accepts 
nature as he finds it, the more unexpected beauty he discovers 
in what he at first despised ; but once let him arrogate the 

10 



218 PAINTING. 

right of rejection, and lie will gradually contract his cjrcle of 
enjoyment, until what he supposed to be nobleness of selec- 
tion ends in narrowness of perception. Dwelling perpetually 
upon one class of ideas, his art becomes at once monstrous 
and morbid ; until at last he cannot faithfully represent even 
what he chooses to retain; his discrimination contracts into 
darkness, and his fastidiousness fades into fatuity. 

High art, therefore, consists neither in altering, nor in im- 
proving nature ; but in seeking throughout nature for " what- 
soever things are lovely, and whatsoever things are pure ;" in 
loving these, in displaying to the utmost of the painter's pow?r 
such loveliness as is in them, and directing the thoughts of 
others to them by winning art, or gentle emphasis. Of the 
degree in which this can be done, and in which it may be per- 
mitted to gather together, without Msifying, the finest forms 
or thoughts, so as to create a sort of perfect vision, we shall 
have to speak hereafter : at present, it is enough to remember 
that art [cceteris paribus) is gi-eat in exact proportion to the 
love of beauty shown by the painter, provided that love of 
beauty forfeit no atom of truth ./ 

Ill, Sincerity. — The next* characteristic of great art is that 
it includes the largest possible quantity of Truth in the mo3t 
perfect possible harmony. If it were possible for art to give 
all the truths of nature, it ought to do it. But this is not 
possible. Choice must always be made of some facts which 
can be represented, from among others which must be passed 
by in silence, or even, in some respects, misrepresented. The 
inferior artist chooses unimportant and scattered truths ; the 
great artist chooses the most necessary first, and afterwards 
the most consistent with these, so as to obtain the greatest 
possible and most harmonious s^mi. For instance, Rembrandt 

♦ I name them in order of wjcreasmg not dooreas'ng importance. 



CHARACTERISTICS OF "GREATNESS OF STYLE.' '219 

always chooses to represent the exact force with which the 
light on the most iUumined part of an object is opposed to its 
obscurer j^ortions. In order to obtain this, in most cases, not 
very unportant truth, he sacrifices the light and color of five- 
sixths of his picture ; and the expression of every character 
of objects which depends on tenderness of shape or tint. But 
he obtains his single truth, and what picturesque and forcible 
expression is dependent upon it, with magnificent skill and 
subtlety. Veronese, on the contrary, chooses to represent the 
great relations of visible things to each other, to the heaven 
above, and to the earth beneath them. He holds it more 
imj^ortant to show how a figure stands relieved from delicate 
air, or marble Avail ; how as a red, or purple, or white figure, it 
separates itself, in clear discernibility, from things not red, nor 
purple, nor white ; how infinite daylight shines round it ; how 
innumerable veils of faint shadow invest it ; how its black- 
ness and darkness are, in the excess of their nature, just 
as limited and local as its intensity of light : all this, I say, 
ho feels to be more important than showing merely the 
exact measure of the spark of sunshine that gleams on a 
dagger-hilt. 

As its greatness depends on the sum of truth, and this sum 
of truth can always be increased by delicacy of handling, it 
follows that all great art must have this delicacy to the utmost 
possible degree. This rule is infallible and inflexible. All 
coarse work is the sign of low art. Only, it is to be remem- 
bered, that coarseness must be estimated by the distance fi-om 
the eye; it being necessary to consult this distance, Avhen 
great, by lap'ng on touches which appear coarse Avhcn seen 
near ; but which, so far from being coarse, are, in reality, more 
delicate in a master's Avork than the finest close handling, 
for they invoh^e a calciilation of result, and are laid on with a 
subtlety of sense precisely correspondent to that with which a 



220 PAINTIiSIG. 

good archer draws liis bow ; the spectator seeing in the action 
nothing but the strain of the strong arm, while there is, in 
reality, in the finger and eye, an ineffably delicate estimate of 
distance, and touch on the arrow plume. And, indeed, this 
delicacy is generally quite perceptible to those who know 
what the truth is, for strokes by Tintoret or Paul Veronese, 
which were done in an instant, and look to an ignorant spec- 
tator merely like a violent dash of loaded color (and are, as 
such, imitated by blundering artists), are, in fact, modulated 
by the brush and finger to that degree of delicacy that no 
single grain of the color could be taken from the touch without 
injury ; and little golden particles of it, not the size of a 
gnat's head, have important share and function in the balances 
of light in a picture perhaps fifty feet long, Nearly every 
other rule applicable to ai't has some exception but this. This 
has absolutely none. > All great art is delicate art, /and all 
coarse art is bad art. Nay, even to a certain extent, all hold 
art is bad art ; for boldness is not the proper word to apply 
to the courage and swiftness of a great master, based on 
knowledge, and coujjled with fear and love. There is as much 
difference between the boldness of the true and the false \ 
masters, as there is between the courage of a pure woman and S 
the shamelessness of a lost one. ^' 

rV. Invention. — The last characteristic of great art is that 
it must be inventive, that is, be produced by the imagination. 
In this respect it must precisely fulfil the definition already 
given of poetry; and not only present grounds for noble 
emotion, but furnish these grounds by imaginative power. 
Hence there is at once a great bar fixed between the two 
schools of Lower and Higher Art. The lower merely copies 
what is set before it, whether in portrait, landscape, or still-life ; 
the higher either entirely imagines its subject, or ai-ranges the 
materials presented to it, so as to manifest the imaginative 

A 



CHARACTEEISTICS OF "GREATNESS OF STYLE." 22 1 

power in all the three phases which have been already ex 
plained in the second volume. 

And this was the truth which was confusedly present in 
Reynolds's mind when he spoke, as above quoted, of the differ 
ence between Historical and Poetical Painting. Every rela 
Hon of the plain facts lohich the painter saio is proper histo- 
rical painting.* If those facts are unimportant (as that he 
saw a gambler quarrel with another gambler, or a sot enjoying 
himself with another sot), then the history is trivial ; if the 
facts are important (as that he saw such and such a great 
man look thus, or act thus, at such a time), then the history is 
noble : in each case perfect truth of narrative being supposed, 
otherwise the whole thing is worthless, being neither history 
nor poetry, biit plain falsehood. And farther, as greater or 
less elegance and precision are manifested in the relation or 
painting of the incidents, the merit of the work varies ; so 
that, what with difference of subject, and what with differ- 
ence of treatment, historical painting falls or rises in changeful 
eminence, from Dutch trivialities to a Velasquez portrait, just 
as historical talking or writing varies in eminence, from an old 
woman's story-telling up to Herodotus. Besides which, cer- 
tain operations of the imagination come into play inevitably, 
here and there, so as to touch the history with some light of 
poetry, that is, with some hght shot forth of the narrator's 
mind, or brought out by the way he has put the accidents 
together ; and wherever the imagination has thus had any- 
thmg to do with the matter at all (and it must be somewhat 
cold work where it has not), then, the confines of the lower 
and higher schools touching each other, the woi*k is colored 
by both ; but there is no reason why, therefore, we should in 
the least confuse the historical and poetical characters, any 

* Compare my Edinburgh Lectures, lecture iv. p. 218, et seq. (2d edition). 



222 •> PAINTIJSTG. 

more than that we should confuse bhie with crimson, because ./ ^ 
they may overlap each other, and produce purple. " 

Now, historical or simply narrative art is very precious in 
its proper place and way, but it is never great art until the ^- 
poetical or imaginative power touches it ; and in proportion jj 
to the stronger manifestation of this power, it becomes greater "^ 
and greater, while the highest art is purely imaginative, all 
its materials being wrought into their form by invention ; and 
it differs, therefore, from the simple historical painting, exactly 4- 
afcf Woi'dsworth's stanza, above quoted, differs from Saussure's 
plam narrative of the parallel fact; and the imaginative 
painter differs from the historical painter in the manner that 
Wordsworth differs from Saussure. 

Farther, imaginative art always includes historical art; 
so that, strictly speaking, according to the analogy above 
used, we meet with the pure blue, and with the crimson ruling 
the blue and changing it into kingly purple, but not with the 
pure crimson : for all imagination must deal Mith the know- 
ledge it has before accumulated ; it never produces anything -f 
but by combination or contemplation. Creation, in the full 
sense, is impossible to it. And the mode in which the histo- 
rical faculties are included by it is often quite simple, and 
easily seen. Thus, ia Hunt's great poetical picture of the 
Light of the "World, the whole thought and arrangement of 
the picture being imagmative, the several details of it are 
\vrought out with simple portraiture ; the ivy, the jewels, the 
creeping plants, and the moonlight being calmly studied or 
remembered from the things themselves. But of all these 
special ways in which the invention works with plain facts, we 
shall have to treat fixrther afterwards. 

And now, finally, since this poetical power includes the 
historical, if we glance back to the other quaUties required in 
great art, and jiut all together, Ave find that the sum of them 



CHARACTERISTICS OF "GREATNESS OF STYLE.'.' 223 

IS simply the sum of all the powers of man. Fox* as (1) the 
choice of the high subject involves all conditions of right 
moral choice, and as (2) the love of beauty involves all condi- 
tions of right admiration, and as (3) the grasp of truth 
involves all strength of sense, evenness of judgment, and 
honesty of purpose, and as (4) the poetical power involves all 
SN^dftness of invention, and accuracy of historical memory, the 
sum of all these j^owers is the sum of the human soul. Hence 
we see whj' the Avord " Great" is used of this art. It is lite- 
rally great. It compasses and calls forth the entu'e human 
spirit, whereas any other kind of art, being more or less small 
or narrow, compasses and calls forth only part of the human 
spirit. Hence the idea of its magnitude is a literal and just 
one, the art being simply less or greater in proportion to the 
number of faculties it exercises and addresses.* And this is 
the ultimate meaning of the definition I gave of it long ago, i 
as containing the "greatest number of the greatest ideas." >^ 

Such, then, being the characters required in order to con- 
stitute high art, if the reader wiU think over them a little, and 
over the various ways in which they may be ialsely assumed, 
he will easily perceive how spacious and dangerous a field of 
discussion they open to the ambitious critic, and of error to 
the ambitious artist; he will see how difficult it must be, 
either to distinguish what is truly great art from the mocke- 
ries of it, or to rank the real artists in anything like a pro- 
gressive system of greater and less. For it will have been 
observed that the various qualities which form greatness are 
partly inconsistent with each other (as some virtues are, 
docility and firmness for instance), and partly independent of 
each other ; and the fact is, that artists differ not more by 
mere capacity, than by the component elements of their capa- 
city, each possessing in very different proportions the several 

* Compare Stones of Venice, vol. iii. chap. iv. § 7, and § 21. 



224 - PAIXTIXG. 

attributes of greatness ; so that, classed by one kind of merit, 
as, for instance, purity of expression, Angelico will stand 
highest ; classed by another, sincerity of manner, Veronese 
will stand highest ; classed by another, love of beauty, Leo- 
nardo will stand liighest ; and so on ; hence arise continual 
disputes and misunderstandings among those who think that 
high art must always be one and the same, and that great 
artists ought to unite all great attributes in an equal degree. 

In one of the exquisitely finished tales of Marmontel, a com- 
pany of critics are received at dinner by the hero of the story, 
an old gentleman, somewhat vain of his acqicired taste, andhia 
niece, by whose incorrigible natural taste, he is seriously dis- 
turbed and tormented. During the entertainment, " On par- 
courut tous les genres de litterature, et pour donner plus d'es- 
sor a I'erudition et a la critique, on mit sur le tapis cette ques- 
tion toute neuve, S5avoir, lequel meritoit le preference de 
Corneille ou de Racine. L'on disoit raerae la-dessus les plus 
belles choses du monde, lorsque la petite ni^ce, qui n'avoit pas 
dit un mot, s'avisa de demander naivement lequel des deux 
fruits, de I'orange ou de la peche, avoit le got\t les plus exquis 
et meritoit le plus d'eloges. Son onclc rougit de sa siraplicite, 
et les convives baisserent tous les yeux sans daigner repondre 
a cette betise. Ma ni^ce, dit Fintac, a votre age, il faut S5a- 
voir ecouter, et se taii'e." 

I cannot close this chapter with shorter or better advice to 
the reader, than merely, whenever he hears discussions about 
the relative merits of great masters, to remember the young 
lady's question. It is, indeed, true that there is a relative 
merit, that a peach is nobler than a hawthorn berry, and still 
more a hawthorn berry than a bead of the nightshade ; but in 
each rank of fruits, as in each rank of masters, one is endowed 
with one virtue, and another with another ; their glory is their 
dissimilarity, and they w^ho propose to themselves in the trais 



CHARACTERISTICS OF "GREATNESS OF STYLE." 225 

iiig of au artist that he should unite the coloring of Tintoret, 
the finish of Albert Durer, and the tenderness of Correggio, 
are no wiser than a horticulturist would be, who made it the 
object of his labor to produce a fruit Avliich should unite in 
itself the lusciousuess of the grape, the crispness of the nut, and 
the fragrance of the pine. 

And from these considerations one most important practical 
corollary is to be deduced, with the good help of Mademoiselle 
Agathe's simile, namely, that the greatness or smallness of a 
man is, in the most conclusive sense, determined for him at his 
birth, as strictly as it is determined for a fruit whether it is to 
be a currant or an apricot. Education, favorable circum- 
stances, resolution, and industry can do much ; in a cei*tain 
sense they do everything ; that is to say, they determine 
whether the poor apricot shall fall in the form of a green bead, 
blighted by an east wind, shall be trodden under foot, or 
whether it shall expand into tender pride, and sweet bright- 
ness of golden velvet. But apricot out of currant, — great man 
out of small, — did never yet art or effort make ; and, in a 
general way, men have then* excellence nearly fixed for them 
when they are born ; a little cramped and frost-bitten on one 
side, a little sun-burnt and fortune-spotted on the other, they 
reach, between good and evil chances, such size and taste as 
generally belong to the men of their calibre, and the small in 
their serviceable bunches, the great in their golden isolation, 
have, these no cause for regret, nor those for disdain. 

Therefore it is, that every system of teaching is false which 
holds forth " great art " as in any wise to be taught to students, 
or even to be aimed at by them. Great art is precisely that 
which never was, nor will be taught, it is pre-eminently 
and finally the expression of the spirits of great men ; so that 
the only wholesome teaching is that which simply endeavors 
to fix those characters of nobleness in the pupil's mind of which 

10* 



226 PAixrixa. 

it seems easily susceptible ; and without holding- out to him, f.a 
a possible or even probable result, that he should ever paint 
like Titian, or carve like Michael Angelo, enforces upon him 
the manifest possibility, and assured duty, of endeavoring to 
draw ill a manner at least honest and mtelligible ; and culti- 
vates in him those general charities of heart, sincerities of 
thought, and graces of habit which are likely to lead him, 
throughout life, to prefer ojoenness to affectation, realities to 
shadows, and beauty to corruption, i 

THE FALSE IDEAL. 

The pursuit, by the imagination, of beautiful and strange 
thoughts or subjects, to the exclusion of painful or common 
ones, is called among us, in these modern days, the pursuit of 
^^ the ideal;" nor does any subject deserve more attentive 
examination than the manner in which this pursuit is entered 
upon by the modern mmd. The reader must pardon me for 
making in the outset one or two statements which may appear 
to him somewhat wide of the matter, but which, (if he admits 
their truth,) he will, I think, presently perceive to reach to the 
root of it. Namely, 

That men's proper business in this world falls mainly into 
three divisions : 

First, to know themselves, and the existing state of the 
things they have to do with. 

Secondly, to be happy in themselves, and in the existing state 
of things. 

Thirdly, to mend themselves, and the existing state of things, 
as far as either are marred or mendable. 

These, I say, are the three plain divisions of proper human 
business on this earth. For these three, the following are 
usually substituted and adopted by human creatures: 



THE FALSE IDEAL. 227 

First, to be totally ignorant of themselves, and the existing 
state of things. 

Secondly, to be miserable in themselves, and in the existing 
state of things. 

Thirdly, to let themselves, and the existing state of things, 
alone (at least in the way of correction). 

The dispositions which induce us to manage, thus wisely, 
/ the affairs of this hfe seem to be : 

First, a fear of disagreeable facts, and conscious shrinking 

from clearness of light, which keep us from examining ourselves, 

and increase gradually into a species of instinctive terror at all 

truth, and love of glosses, veils, and decorative lies of every sort, 

] Secondly, a general readiness to take delight in anything 

I past, future, far off, or somewhere else, rather than in things 

I now, near, and here ; leading us gradually to place our pleasure 

principally in the exercise of the imagination, and to build all 

our satisfaction on things as they are not. Which power being 

one not accorded to the lower animals, and having indeed, 

when disciplined, a^very noble use, we pride om-selves upon it, 

whether disciplined or not, and pass our lives complacently, in 

substantial discontent, and visionary satisfaction. 

JS^ow nearly all artistical and poetical seeking after the ideal 
is only one branch of this base habit — the abuse of the imagina- 
tion, in allowing it to find its whole delight in the impossible 
and untrue ; while the faithful pursuit of the ideal is an honest 
/ use of the imagination, giving full power and presence to the 
' possible and true. 

It is the difference between these two uses of it which Ave 
fiave to examine. 

And, first, consider what are the legitimate uses of the 
imagination, that is to say, of the power of perceiving, or 
conceiving with the mind, things which cannot be perceived by 
the senses. 



228 PAINTING. 

Its first and noblest use is, to enable us to bring sensibly 
to our sight the tbings which are recorded as belonging to our 
future state, or as invisibly surrounding us in this. It is given 
us, that we may imagine the cloud of witnesses in heaven 
and earth, and see, as if they were noAV present, the souls of 
the righteous waiting for us ; that we may conceive the great 
army of the inhabitants of heaven, and discover among them 
those whom we most desire to be with for ever ; that we may 
be able to vision forth the ministry of angels beside us, and see 
the chariots of fire on the mountains that gird us round ; but 
above all, to call up the scenes and facts in which we are 
commanded to believe, and be present, as if in the body, at 
every recorded event of the liistory of the Redeemer. / Its 
second and ordinary use is to empower us to traverse the scenes 
of all other history, and force the facts to become again visible, 
so as to make upon us the same impression which they would 
have made if we had witnessed them; and in the minor 
necessities of life, to enable us, out of any present good, 
to gather the utmost measure of enjoyment by investing 
it with happy associations, and, in any present evil, to 
lighten it, by summoning back the images of other hours; 
and, also, to give to all mental truths some visible type in 
allegory, simile, or personification, which shall more deeply 
enforce them ; and, finally, when the mind is utterly out- 
wearied, to refresh it with such innocent play as shall be 
most in harmony with the suggestive voices of natural 
things, permitting it to possess living companionship instead 
of silent beauty, and create for itself faii'ies in the grass and 
naiads in the wave. 

These being the uses of imagination, its abuses are either 
in creating, for mere pleasure, false images, where it is its 
duty to create trufe ones ; or in turning what was intended 
for the mere refreshment of the heart into its daily food, and 



THE FALSE IDEAX. 229 

changing the mnocent pastimes of an hour mto the guilty 
occupation of a Ufe. 

It became necessary, to the full display of all the power of 
the artist, that the subject should in many respects be more 
faithfully imagined that it had been hitherto. "Keeping," 
"Expression," "Historical Unity," and such other require- 
ments, were enforced on the pamter, in the same tone, and 
with the same purpose, as the purity of his oil and the ac- 
curacy of his perspective. He was told that the figure of 
Christ should be " dignified," those of the Apostles " expres- 
sive," that of the Virgin "modest," and those of children 
" innocent." All tliis was perfectly true ; and in obedience to 
such directions, the painter proceeded to manufacture certain 
arrangements of apostolic sublimity, virginal mildness, and 
infantine innocence, which, being free from the quaint imper- 
fection and contradictoriness of the early art, were looked 
upon by the European public as true things, and trustworthy 
representations of the events of religious history. The pic- 
tures of Francia and Bellini had been received as pleasant 
visions. But the cartoons of Raphael were received as repre- 
sentations of historical fact. 

Now, neither they, nor any other work of the period, were 
representations either of historical or possible fact. They 
were, in the strictest sense of the word, " compositions" — cold 
arrangements of propriety and agreeableness, according to 
academical formulas ; the painter never in any case making 
the slightest effort to conceive the thing as it must have hap- 
pened, but only to gather together graceful lines and beautiful 
faces, in such compliance with commonplace ideas of the sub- 
ject as might obtain for the whole an "epic vmity," or some 
such other form of scholastic perfectness. 

Take a very important instance. 



230 PAINTING. 

I suppose there is no event in the whole life of Christ to 
which, in hours of doubt or fear, men turn with more anxicus 
thirst to know the close facts of it, or with more earnest and 
passionate dwelling upon every syllable of its recorded narra- 
tive, than Christ's showing Hunself to his disciples at the lake 
of Galilee. There is something preeminently open, natural, 
full fronting our disbelief in this manifestation. The others, 
recorded after the resurrection, were sudden, phantom-like, 
occurring to men in profound sorrow and wearied agitation of 
heart ; not, it might seem, safe judges of what they saw. But 
the agitation was now over. They had gone back to their 
daily work, thinking stUl their business lay net-wards, un- 
meshed from the literal rope and drag. " Simon Peter saith 
unto them, ' I go a fishing.' They say unto hun, ' We also go 
with thee.' " True words enough, and having far echo beyond 
those Galilean hills. That night they caught nothmg ; but 
when the morning came, in the clear light of it, behold a 
figure stood on the shore. They were not thinking of any- 
thing but their fruitless hauls. They had no guess who it was. 
It asked them simply if they had caught anything. They said 
no. And it tells them to cast yet again. And John shades 
his eyes from the morning sun with his hand, to look who it 
is ; and though the glinthig of the sea, too, dazzles hun, he 
makes out who it is, at last ; and poor Simon, not to be 
outrun this time, tightens his fisher's coat about him, and 
dashes hi, over the nets. One would have liked to see him 
r swim those hmidred yards, and stagger to his knees on the 
beach. 

Well, the others get to the beach, too, in time, in such slow 
way as men in general do get, in this world, to its true shore, 
much impeded by that wonderful " dragging the net with 
fishes ;" but they get there — seven of them in all ; — first the 
Denier, and then the slowest believer, and then the quickest 



THE FALSE IDEAL. , 231 

believer, and then the two throne-seekers, and two more, we 
know not who. 

They sit down on the shore face to face with Him, and eat 
their broiled fish as He bids. And then, to Peter, all dripping 
still, shivering, and amazed, staring at Christ in the sun on the 
other side of the coal fire, — thinking a little, perhaps, of what 
happened by another coal fire, when it was colder, and having 
had no word once changed with him by his Master since that 
look of His, — to him, so amazed, comes the question, " Simon, 
lovest thou me ?" Try to feel that a little, and thmk of it tilJ 
it is true to you ; and then, take up that infinite monstrosity 
and hypocrisy — Raphael's cartoon of the Charge to Peter. 
Note, first, the bold fallacy — the putting all the Apostles 
there, a mere lie to serve the Papal heresy of the Petric su- 
premacy, by putting them all in the background while Peter 
receives the charge, and making them all witnesses to it. Note 
the handsomely curled hair and neatly tied sandals of the men 
who had been out all night in the sea-mists and on the slimy 
decks. • Note their convenient dresses for going a-fishing, with 
trains that lie a yard along the ground, and goodly fringes, — • 
all made to match, an apostohc fishing costume.* Note how 
Peter especially (whose chief glory was in his wet coat girt 
about him and naked limbs) is enveloped in folds and fringes, 
so as to kneel and hold his keys with grace. No fire of coals 
at all, nor lonely mountain shore, but a pleasant Italian land- 
scape, full Ox' villas and churches, and a flock of sheep to be 
pointed at ; and the whole grouj) of Apostles, not round Christ, 
as they would have been naturally, but straggling away m a 
line, that they may all be shown. 

The simple truth is, that the moment we look at the picture 

* I suppose Raphael intended a reference to Numbers xv. 38. ; but if lie 
did, the blue ribaud, or "vitta," as it is in the Vulgate, should have been ou 
the borders too. •'■ 



232 PAINTING. 

we feel our belief of the whole tlnng taken away. There is, 
visibly, no possibility of that group ever havmg existed, in 
any place, or on any occasion. It is all a mere mythic absur- 
dity, and faded concoction of frmges, muscular arms, and 
curly l^ads of Greek philosophers. 

Now, the evil consequences of the acceptance of this kind 
of religious idealism for true, were instant and manifold. So' 
"far as it was received and trusted in by thoughtful persons, 
it only served to chill all the conceptions of sacred history 
which they might otherwise have obtained. Whatever they 
could have fancied for themselves about the wild, strange, 
infinitely stern, infinitely tender, infinitely varied veracities of 
the life of Christ, was blotted out by the vapid fineries of 
Raphael ; the rough Galilean pUot, the orderly custom 
receiver, and all the questioning wonder and fire of unedu- 
cated apostleship, were obscured under an antique masque of 
philosophical faces and long robes. The feeble, subtle, sufier- 
ing, ceaseless energy and humiliation of St. Paul were con- 
fused with an idea of a meditative Hercules leaning on a 
sweeping sword ;* and the mighty presences of Moses and 
Elias were softened by introductions of dehcate grace adopted 
from dancing nymphs and rising Auroras.f 

Now, no vigorously minded religious person could possibly 
receive pleasure or help from such art as this ; and the neces- 

* In the St. CecOia of Bologna. 

f In the Transfiguration. Do but try to believe that Moses and Elias are 
really there talking with Christ. Moses in the loveliest heart and midst of 
the land which once it had been denied him to behold, — Elijah treading tlie 
earth again, from which he had been swept to heaven in fire ; both now 
with a mightier message than ever they had given in life, — mightier, 
in closing their own mission, — mightier, in speaking to Christ " of His 
decease, which He should accomplish at Jerasalem." They, men of like pas- 
sions once with us, appointed to speak to the Redeemer of Ilis death. 

And, then, look at Raphael's kicking gracefulnesses. 



THE FALSE IDEAL. 233 

sary result was the instant rejection of it by the healthy reli- 
gion of the world. Raphael ministered, with applause, to the 
impious luxury of the Vatican, but was trampled under foot 
at once by every believing and advancing Christian of his own 
and subsequent times ; and thenceforward pure Christianity 
^nd " high art" took separate roads, and fared on, as best they 
might, independently of each other. 

But although Calvin, and Knox, and Luther, and their 
flocks, with all the hardest-headed and truest-hearted faithful 
left in Christendom, thus spurned away the spurious art, and 
) all art with it (not without harm to themselves, such as a man 
■(must needs sustain in cutting off a decayed limb*), certain 
-conditions of weaker Christianity suffered the false system to 
retain influence over them ; and to this day, the clear and 
tasteless poison of the art of Raphael infects with sleei> of 
infideUty the hearts of millions of Christians. It is the first 
cause of all that preeminent dulness which characterizes 
what Protestants call sacred art ; a dulness, not merely bane- 
ful in making rehgion distasteful to the young, but in sicken- 
ing, as we have seen, all vital behef of religion in the old. 
A dim sense of impossibility attaches itself always to the 
graceful emptiness of the representation ; we feel instinc- 
tively that the jDainted Christ and painted apostle are not 
beings that ever did or could exist ; and this fatal sense of fan* 
fabulousness, and well-composed impossibility, steals gradually 
from the picture into the history, until we find ourselves read- 
ing St. Mark or St. Luke with the same admiring, but unin- 
terested, incredulity, with which we contemplate Raphael. 

On a certain class of minds, however, these Raphaelesque 
and other sacred paintings of high order, have had, of late 

* Luther had no dislike of religious art on principle. Even the stove in 
his chamber was wrought with sacred subjects. See Mrs. Stowe's Sunny 
Memories. 



234 PAINTIXG. 

years, another kind of infliience, much resembling that which 
they had at fii'st on the most pious Romanists. They are used 
to excite certain conditions of religious dream or reverie ; being 
again, as in eai-liest times, regarded not as representations of 
fact, but as expressions of sentiment respecting the fact. In 
this way the best of them have unquestionably much purifying 
and enchanting power ; and they are helpful opponents to sin- 
ful passion and weakness of every kind. A fit of unjust anger, 
petty malice, unreasonable vexation, or dark jDassion, cannot 
certainly, in a mind of ordinary sensibility, hold its own in the 
presence of a good engraving from any work of Angelico, 
Memling, or Perugino. But I nevertheless believe, that he ' 
who trusts much to such helps will find them fail him at his 
need ; and that the dependence, in any great degree, on the 
jjresence or power of a picture, indicates a wonderfully fi3eble 
sense of the presence and power of God. I do not think : 
that any man, who is thoroughly certain that Christ is in the i 
room, will care what sort of pictures of Christ he has on its 
walls ; and, in the plurality of cases, the delight taken in art- 
of this kind is, in reality, nothing more than a form of grace- 
ful indulgence of those sensibilities which the habits of a dis- 
ciplined life restrain in other directions. Such art is, in a word) 
the opera and drama of the monk. Sometimes it is worse than 
this, and the love of it is the mask under which a general 
thirst for morbid excitement will pass itself for religion. The 
young lady who rises in the middle of the day, jaded by her 
last night's ball, and utterly incapable of any simple or whole- 
some religious exercise, can still gaze into the dark eyes of the 
Madonna di San Sisto, or dream over the whiteness of an ivory 
crucifix, and returns to the course of her daily life in full per- 
suasion that her morning's feverishness has atoned for her 
evening's folly. And all the while, the art which possesses 
these very doubtful advantages is acting for undoubtful dctri 



rf 



THE FALSE IDEAL. 235 

meiit, in the various ways above examined, on the inmost fast- 
nesses of faith ; it is throwing subtle endearments round fool- 
ish traditions, confusing sweet fancies with sound doctrines, 
obscuring real events with unlikely semblances, and enforcing 
false assertions with pleasant circumstantiality, until, to the 
usual, and assuredly sufficient, difficulties standing in the way 
of beHef, its votaries have added a habit of sentimentally 
changing what they know to be true, and of dearly loving 
what they confess to be false. 

Has there, then (the reader asks emphatically), been no 
ti'ue religious ideal ? Has religious art never been of any ser- 
vice to mankind ? I fear, on the whole, not. Of true reUgious 
ideal, representing events historically recorded, with solemn 
effort at a sincere and unartificial conception, there exist, as 
yet, hardly any examples. Xearly all good religious pictures 
fall into one or other branch of the false ideal already 
examined, either into the Angelican (passionate ideal) or the 
Rajihaelesque (philosophical ideal). But there is one true 
form of religious art, nevertheless, in the pictures of the pas- 
sionate ideal which represent imaginary beings of another 
world. Since it is evidently right that we should try to 
imagine the glories of the next world, and as this imaguiation 
must be, in each separate mind, more or less different, and 
unconfined by any laws of material fact, the passionate ideal 
has not only full scope here, but it becomes our duty to urge 
its powers to its utmost, so that every condition of beautiful 
form and color may be employed to invest these scenes Avith 
greater delightfulness (the whole being, of course, received as 
an assertion of possibility, not of absolute fact). All the para- 
dises imagined by the religious painters — the choirs of glori- 
fied saints, angels, and spiritual powers, when painted with 
full behef in this possibility of their existence, are true ideals ; 
and so far from our having dwelt on these too much, I believe, 



>-> 



236 PAINTING. 

rather, we have not trusted them enough, nor accepted them 
enough, as possible statements of most precious truth. No- 
thing but unmixed good can accrue to any mind from the 
contemplation of Orcagna's Last Judgment or his triumph of 
death, of Angelico's Last Judgment and Paradise, or any of 
the scenes laid in heaven by the other faithful religious masters ; 
and the more they are considered, not as works of art, but as 
real visions of real things, more or less imperfectly set down, 
the more good will be got by dwelling upon them. The same 
is true of all representations of Christ as a living presence 
among us now, as in Hunt's Light of the World. 

The examination of the various degrees in which sacred art 
has reached its j^roper power is not to our present purpose ; 
stUl less, to investigate the infinitely difficult question of its 
past operation on the Christian mind ; it being enough here 
to mark the forms of ideal error, without historically tracing 
their extent, and to state generally that my impression is, up 
to the present moment, that the best religious art has been | 
fdtherto rather a fruit, and attendant sign, of sincere Chris- 1 
tianity than a promoter of or help to it. [ More, I think, has I 
always been done for God by few words than many pictures, | 
and more by few acts than many words. 

^ I must not, however, quit the subject without insisting on 
the chief practical consequence of what we have observed, 
namely, that sacred art, so far from being exhausted, has yet 
to attain the development of its highest branches ; and the 
task, or privilege, yet remams for mankind, to j^roduce an art 
which shall be at once entirely skilful and entirely sincere. 
All the histories of the Bible are, in my judgment, yet waiting 
to be painted. Moses has never been painted ; Elijah never ; 
David never (except as a mere ruddy stripling) ; Deborah 
never; Gideon never; Isaiah never. What single example 
does the reader remember of pamting which suggested so 



THE rAI.SE IDEAL. 237 

mucli as the faintest shadow of these people, or of their deeds ? 
Strong men in armor, or aged men Avith flowing beards, he 
may remember, who, when he looked at his Louvre or Ufiizii 
catalogue, he found were intended to stand for David or for 
Moses. But does he suppose that, if these pictures had sug- 
gested to him the feeblest image of the presence of such men, 
he would have jjassed on, as he assuredly did, to the next 
picture, — representing, doubtless, Diana and Acta^on, or Cupid 
and the Graces, or a gambling quarrel in a pothouse, — with 
no sense of pain, or surprise ? Let him meditate over the 
matter, and he will find ultimately that what I say is true, and 
that religious art, at once complete and sincere, never yet has 
existed. ^-^-^ ' XM.'-f O , "^f^-s^^,^ 

It will exist : nay, I believe the era of its birth has come, 
and that those bright Tm*nerian imageries, which the Euro- 
pean public declared to be "dotage," and those calm Pre- 
Rajshaelite studies ^hich, in like manner, it pronounced 
" puerility," form the first foundation that has been ever laid 
for true sacred art. Of this we shall presently reason farther. 
But, be it as it may, if we would cherish the hope that sacred 
art may, indeed, arise for ws, two separate cautions are to be 
addressed to the two opj)osed classes of rehgionists whose 
influence will chiefly retard that hope's accomplishment. The 
group calling themselves Evangelical ought no longer to 
render their religion an oflTence to men of the world by asso- 
ciating it only with the most vulgar forms of art. It is not 
necessary that they should admit either music or painting 
into religious service; but, if they admit either the one 
or the other, let it not be bad music nor bad pair. ting: it is 
certainly in nowise more for Christ's honor that His praise 
should be sung discordantly, or Ilis miracles painted discre- 
ditably, than that Ilis word should be preached ungramma- 



238 PAINTING. 

tically. Some Evangelicals, however, seem to take a morbid 
jDride in the triple degradation.* 

The opposite class of men, whose natural instincts lead 
them to mingle the refinements of art with all the offices and 
practices of religion, are to be warned, on the contrary, how 
they mistake their enjoyments for their duties, or confound 
poetry with faith. I admit that it is impossible for one man 
to judge another in this matter, and that it can never be said 
with certainty how far what seems frivolity may be force, and 
what seems the indulgence of the heart may be, indeed, its 
dedication. I am ready to believe that Metastasio, exjDiring 
in a canzonet, may have died better than if his prayer had 
been in unmeasured syllables.f But, for the most part, it is 

* I do not know anything more humiliating to a man of common sense, 
than to open what is called an " Illustrated Bible" of modern days. See, for 
instance, the plates in Brown's Biljle (octavo: Edinburgh, 1840) a standard 
evansyelical edition. Our habit of reducing the Psalms to doggrel before we 
will condescend to sing them, is a parallel abuse. It is marvellous to tliink 
that human creatures witli tongues and souls should refuse to chant the 
verse : " Before Ephraim, Benjamin, and Manasseh, stir up thy strength, and 
come and help us;" preferring this: — 

" Behold, how Benjamin expects. 

With Epliraim and Manasseh joined, 
In their deliverance, the effects 
Of thy resistless strength to find!" 
f "En 1780, Age de quatre-vingt-deux ans, au moment de recevoir k 
viatique, il rassombla ses forces, et chanta, a son Createur: 
' Eterno Genitor 
lo t' offro il proprio figlio 
Che in pegno del tuo amor 
Si vuole a me donar. 
A lui rivolgi il ciglio, 
Mira chi t' of^"o ; e poi, 
Niega, Signer, se puoi, 
Niega di perdonar.' " 
— ^Dk StendhaTj, Via de Meictstasio. 



THE FALSE IDEAL. 239 

assuredly much to be feared lest ^e mistake a surrender to 
the charms of art for one to the service of Godj* and, in the 
art which we permit, lest we substitute sentiment for sense, 
grace for i;tility. And for us all there is in this matter even 
a deeper danger than that of hidulgence. There is the 
danger of Artistical Pharisaism. Of all the foi*ms of pride 
and vanity, as there are none more subtle, so I believe there 
are none more sinful, than those which are manifested by the 
Pharisees of art. To be proud of birth, of place, of wit, of 
bodily beauty, is comparatively innocent, just because such 
pride is more natural, and more easily detected. But to be 
proud of our sanctities ; to pour contempt upon our fellows, 
because, forsooth, we like to look at Madonnas in bowers of 
roses, better than at plain pictures of plain things ; and to 
make this religious art of ours the expression of our own per- 
petual self-complacency, — congratulating ourselves, day by 
day, on our purities, proprieties, elevations, and inspirations, 
as above the reach of common mortals, — this I believe to be 
one of the wickedest and foolishest forms of human egotism ; 
and, truly, I had rather, with great, thoughtless, humble Paul 
Veronese, make the Supper at Emmaus a background for two 
children playing with a dog (as, God knows, men do usually 
put it in the background to everything, if not out of sight 
altogether), than join that school of modern Germanism which 
Avears its pieties for decoration as women wear their dia- 
monds, and flaunts the dry fleeces of its phylacteries between 
its dust and the dew of heaven. 

When we })ass to the examination of what is beautiful and 
expressive in art, we shall frequently find distinctive qualities 
in the minds even of inferior artists, which have led them to the 
pursuit and embodying of particular trains of thought, alto- 
gether diflferent from those Avhich direct the compositions of other 



240 PAINTING. 

men, and incapable of comparison with tliera. Now, when 
this is the case, we should consider it in the highest degree 
both invidious and illogical, to say of such different modes of 
exertion of the intellect, that one is in all points greater or 
nobler than another. We shall probably find something in 
the working of all minds which has an end and a power pecu- 
liar to itself, and which is deserving of free and full admiration, 
without any reference whatsoever to what has, in other fields, 
been accomplished by other modes of thought, and directions 
of aim. We shall, indeed, find a wider range and grasp in one 
man than in another ; but yet it will be our own fault if we do 
not discover something in the most Umitcd range of mind which 
is different from, and in its way better than, anything presented 
to us by the more grasping hitellect. We all know that the 
nightingale sings more nobly than the lark ; but who, therefore, 
would wish the lark not to sing, or would deny that it had a 
character of its own, which bore a part among the melodies of 
creation no less essential than that of the more richly-gifted 
bird ? And thus we shall find and feel that whatever difference 
may exist between the intellectual powers of one artist and 
another, yet wherever there is anj- true genius, there will be 
some peculiar lesson which even the humblest will teach us 
more sweetly and perfectly than those far above them in 
jirouder attributes of mind ; and we should be as mistaken as 
we should be unjust and invidious, if we refused to receive this 
iht'ir peculiar message with gratitude and veneration, merely 
because it was a sentence and not a volume. But the case is 
different when we examine their relative fidelity to given facts. 
That fidelity depends on no peculiar modes of thought or 
habits of character ; it is the result of keen sensibility, combined 
with high powers of memory and association. These qualities, 
as such, are the same in all men ; character or feeling may 
direct their choice to this or that object, but the fidelity with 



THE FALSE IDEAL. 241 

which they treat either the one or the other, is dependent on 
those simple powers of sense and intellect which are like and 
comparable in all, and of which we can always say that they 
are greater in this man, or less in that, without reference to the 
character of the individual. 

I believe there is nearly as much occasion, at the present 
day, for advocacy of Michael Angelo against the pettiness of 
the moderns, as there is for support of Turner against the con- 
ventionalities of the ancients. For, though the names of the 
fathers of sacred art are on all our lips, our faith in them is 
much like that of the great world in its religion — nominal, but 
dead. In vain our lectm-ers sound the name of Raffaelle in the 
ears of their pupils, while their own works are visibly at 
variance with every prmciple deducible from his. In vain is 
the young student compelled to produce a certain number of 
school copies of Michael Angelo, when liis bread must depend 
on the number of gewgaws he can crowd into his canvas. And 
I could with as much zeal exert myself against the modern 
system of English historical ai*t, as I have in favor of our school 
of landscape, but that it is an ungrateful and painful task to 
attack the works of living painters, struggling with adverse 
circumstances of every kind, and especially with the false taste 
of a nation which regards matters of art either with the tick- 
lishness of an infant, or the stolidity of a Megatherium. 

NoM^, there is but one grand style, in the treatment of all 
subjects whatsoever, and that style is based on the perfect 
knowledge, and consists in the simple, unencumbered render- 
ing, of the specific characters of the given object, be it man, 
beast, or flower. Every change, caricature, or abandonment 
of such specific character, is as destructive of grandeur as it is 
of truth, of beauty as of propriety. Every alteration of the 
features of nature has its origin either in powerless indolence 

11 



242 PAINTING. 

or blind audacity, in the folly which forgets, or the insoleice 
which desecrates, works which it is the pride of angel» to know, 
and their privilege to love. 

Painting, or art generally, as such, with all its technicalities, 
difficulties, and particular ends, is nothing but a noble and 
expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but 
by itself nothing. He who has learned what is commonly con- 
sidered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of represent- 
ing any natural object faithfully, has as yet only learned the 
language by which his thoughts are to be expressed. He has 
done just as much towards being that which we ought \.o 
respect as a great painter, as a man who has learned how to 
exj^ress himself grammatically and melodiously has towards 
being a great poet. The language is, indeed, more difficult of 
acquirement in the one case than in the other, and possesses 
more power of delighting the sense, while it speaks to the 
intellect, but it is, nevertheless, nothing more than language, 
and all those excellences which are peculiar to the painter as 
such, are merely what rhythm, melody, precision and force are 
in the words of the orator and the poet, necessary to their 
greatness, but not the tests of their greatness. It is not by 
the mode of representing and saying, but by what is repre- 
sented and said, that the respective greatness either of the 
painter or the writer is to be finally determined. 

Speaking with strict propiiety, therefore, we should call a 
man a great painter only as he excelled in precision ana force 
in the language of lines, and a great versifier, as he excelled in 
precision or force in the language of words. A great poet 
would then be a term strictly, and in precisely the same sense 
applicable to both, if warranted by the character of the 
images or thoughts which each in their respective languages 
conveyed. 



THE FALSE IDE AT.. 243 

Take, for instance, one of the most perfect poems or pictures 
(I use the words as synonymous) which modern times have 
seen : — the " Old Shepherd's Chief-mourner." Here the exqui- 
site execution of the glossy and crisp hair of the dog, the 
bright sharp touching of the green hough beside it, the clear 
painting of the wood of the coffin and the folds of the blanket, 
are language — language clear and expressive in the highest 
degree. But the close pressure of the dog's breast against the 
wood, the convulsive clinging of the paws, which has dragged 
the blanket off the trestle, the total powerlessness of the head 
laid, close and motionless, upon its folds, the fixed and tearful 
fall of the eye in its utter hopelessness, the rigidity of repose 
which marks that there has been no motion nor change in the 
trance of agony since the last blow was struck on the coffin-lid, 
the quietness and gloom of the chamber, the spectacles mark- 
ing the place where the Bible was last closed, indicating how 
lonely has been the life — how unwatched the departure of him 
who is now laid solitary in his sleep ; — these are all thoughts — 
thoughts by which the picture is separated at once from hun- 
dreds of equal merit, as far as mere painting goes, by which it 
ranks as a work of high art, and stamps its author, not as the 
neat imitator of the texture of a skin, or the fold of a drapery, 
but as the Man of Mind. 

It must be the part of the judicious critic carefully to dis- 
tinguish what is language, and what is thought, and to rank 
and praise pictures chiefly for the latter, considering the for- 
mer as a totally inferior excellence, and one which cannot be 
compared Avith nor weighed against thought in any way nor in 
any degree whatsoever. The picture which has the nobler 
and more numerous ideas, however awkwardly expressed, is a 
greater and a better picture than that which has the less noble 
and less numerous ideas, however beautifully expressed. No 
weight, nor mass, nor beauty of execution can outweigh one 



244 PAINTING. 

grain or fragment of thought. Three penstrokes of Raffaelle 
are a greater and a better jncture than the most finished work 
that ever Carlo Dolci polished into inanity. A finished work 
of a great artist is only better than its sketch, if the sources of 
pleasure belonging to color and realization — valuable in them- 
selves, — are so employed as to increase the impressiveness of 
the thought. But if one atom of thought has vanished, all 
color, all finish, all execution, all ornament, are too dearly 
bought. Nothing but thought can pay for thought, and the 
instant that the increasing refinement or finish of the picture 
begins to be paid for by the loss of the faintest shadow of an 
idea, that mstant all refinement or finish is an excrescence, and 
a deformity. 

I think that all the sources of pleasure, or any other good, 
to be derived from works of art, may be referred to five dis- 
tinct heads. 

I. Ideas of Power. — The perception or conception of the 
mental or bodily powers by which the work has been 
produced. 
n. Ideas of Imitation. — The perception that the thing pro- 
duced resembles something else. 
m. Ideas of Truth. — The perception of faithfulness in a state- 
ment of facts by the thing produced. 
IV. Ideas of Beauty. — The perception of beauty, either in the 

thing produced, or in what it suggests or resembles. 
V. Ideas of Relation. — The perception of intellectual rela- 
tions, in the thing produced, or in what it suggests or 
resembles. 
I shall briefly distinguish the nature and effects of each of 
these classes of ideas. 

I. Ideas of Power. — These are the simple perception of the 
mental or bodily powers exerted in the production of any 
work of art. According to the dignity and degree of the 



IDEAS OF IMITATION. 245 

power perceived is the dignity of the idea ; but the whole class 
of ideas is received by the intellect, and they excite the best 
of the moral feelings, veneration, and the desire of exertion. 
Men may let their great powers lie dormant, while they em- 
ploy their mean and petty powers on mean and petty objects ; 
but it is physically impossible to employ a great power, except 
on a great object. Consequently, wherever power of any kind 
or degree has been exerted, the marks and evidence of it are 
stamped upon its results: it is impossible that it should be 
lost or wasted, or without record, even in the " estimation of 
a hair:" and therefore, whatever has been the subject of a 
great power, bears about with it the image of that which 
created it, and is what is commonly called " excellent." And 
this is the true meaning of the word excellent, as distinguished 
from the terms, " beautiful," " useful," " good," etc. ; and we 
shall always, in future, use the word excellent, as signifying 
that the thing to which it is apphed required a great power 
for its production. 



n. IDEAS OF IMITATIOIT. 

Whenever anything looks like what it is not, the resemblance 
being so great as nearly to deceive, we feel a kind of pleasura- 
ble surprise, an agreeable excitement of mind, exactly the same 
in its nature as that which we receive from juggling. When- 
ever we perceive this in something produced by art, that is to 
say, whenever the work is seen to resemble something which 
we know it is not, we receive what I call an idea of imitation. 
Why such ideas are pleasing, it would be o\it of our present 
purpose to inquire ; we only know that there is no man who 
does not feel pleasure in his animal nature fi*om gentle surprise, 



246 PAINTING. 

and that such surprise can be excited in no more distinct man- 
ner than by the evidence that a thing is not what it appears to 
be. Now two things are requisite to our complete and more 
pleasurable perception of this : first, that the resemblance be 
so perfect as to amount to a deception ; secondly, that there 
be some means of proving at the same moment that it is a 
deception. The most perfect ideas and pleasures of imitation 
are, therefore, when one sense is contradicted by another, both 
bearing as positive evidence on the subject as each is capable 
of alone ; as when the eye says a thing is round, and the finger 
says it is flat ; they are, therefore, never felt in so high a degree 
as in painting, where appearance of projection, roughness, hair, 
velvet, etc., are given with a smooth surface, or in wax-work, 
where the first evidence of the senses is perpetually contra- 
dicted by their experience ; but the moment we come to mar- 
ble, our definition checks us, for a marble figure does not look 
like what it is not ; it looks like marble, and like the form of a 
man, but then it is marble, and it is the form of a man. It 
does not look like a man, which it is not, but like the form of 
a man, which it is. Form is form, bond fide and actual, 
whether in marble or in flesh — not an imitation or resemblance 
of form, but real form. The chalk outline of the bough of a 
tree on paper, is not an imitation ; it looks hke chalk and 
paper — not like wood, and that which it suggests to the mind 
is not properly said to be like the form of a bough, it is the 
form of a bough. 



ni. — IDEAS OF TEUTH. 



The word truth, as applied to art, signifies the faithful 
statement, either to the mind or senses, of any fact of nature. 



IDEAS OF TRUTH. 247 

We receive an idea of truth, then, when we perceive the 
faithfulness of such a statement. 

The difference between ideas of truth and of imitation lies 
chiefly in the following points. 

First, — Imitation can only be of something material, but 
truth has reference to statements both of the qualities of 
material things, and of emotions, impressions, and thoughts. 
There is a moral as well as material truth, — a truth of imj^res- 
sion as well as of form, — of thought as well as of matter ; and 
the truth of impression and thought is a thousand times the 
more important of the two. Hence, truth is a term of universal 
application, but imitation is limited to that narrow field of art 
which takes cognizance only of material things. 

Secondly, — Truth may be stated by any signs or symbols 
which have a definite signification in the minds of those to 
whom they are addressed, although such signs be themselves 
no image nor likeness of anything. Whatever can excite in the 
mind the conception of certain facts, can give ideas of truth, 
though it be in no degree the imitation or resemblance of those 
facts. If there be — we do not say there is, — but if there be in 
painting anything which operates, as words do, not by resem- 
bling anything, but by being taken as a symbol and sub- 
stitute for it, and thus inducmg the effect of it, then this 
channel of communication can convey uncorrupted truth, 
though it do not in any degree resemble the facts whose con- 
ception it induces. But ideas of imitation, of course, require 
the likeness of the object. They sj)eak to the perceptive 
faculties only : truth to the conceptive. 

Thirdly, — And in consequence of what is above stated, an 
idea of truth exists in the statement of one attribute of anything, 
but an idea of imitation requires the resemblance of as many 
attributes as we are usually cognizant of in its real presence. 

The other day at Bruges, while I was endeavoring to set 



248 PAINTING. 

doAvn in my notebook something of the ineffeable expression 
of the Madonna in the cathedral, a French amateur came up to 
me, to inquire if I had seen the modern French pictures in a 
neighboring church. I had not, but felt little inchned to leave 
my marble for all the canvas that ever suifered from French 
brushes. My apathy was attacked with gradually increasing 
energy of praise. Rubens never executed — Titian never colored 
anything like them. I thought this highly probable, and still 
sat quiet. The voice continued at my ear. "Parbleu, Monsieur, 
Michel Ange n'a rien produit de plus beau !" " De plus heau P'' 
repeated I, wishing to know what particular excellences of 
Michael Angelo were to be intimated by this expression. 
"Monsieur, on ne pent plus — c'est un tableau admirable — 
inconcevable : Monsieur," said the Frenchman, liftmg up his 
hands to heaven, as he concentrated in one conclusive and 
overwhelming proposition the qualities which were to outshine 
Rubens and overpower Buonaroti, — "Monsieur, il sort!" 

This gentleman could only perceive two truths — flesh color 
and projection. These constituted his notion of the perfection 
of painting ; because they unite all that is necessary for decep- 
tion. He was not therefore cognizant of many ideas of truth, 
though perfectly cognizant of ideas of imitation. 



rV. — ^IDEAS OF BEAUTY. 



Ideas of beauty are among the noblest which can be presented 
to the human mind, invariably exalting and purifying it accord- 
ing to their degree ; and it would appear that we are intended 
by the Deity to be constantly under their influence, because 
there is not one single object in nature which is not capable of 
conveying them, and which, to the rightly perceiving mind, 



IDEAS OF RELATION. 249 

does not present an incalculably greater number of beautiful 
than of deformed parts ; there being in fact scarcely anything, 
in pure, undiseased nature, like positive deformity, but only 
degrees of beauty, or such slight and rare points of permitted 
contrast as may render all around them more valuable by their 
opposition ; spots of blackness in creation, to make its colors felt. 



V. IDEAS OF RELATION. 



Under this head must be arranged everything productive 
of expression, sentiment, and character, whether in figures or 
landscapes, (for there may be as much definite expression and 
marked carrying out of particular thoughts in the treatment of 
inanimate as of animate nature,) everything relating to the 
conception of the subject and to the congruity and relation of 
its parts; not as they enhance each other's beauty by known 
and constant laws of composition, but as they give each other 
expression and meaning, by particular application, requiring 
distinct thought to discover or to enjoy : the choice, for instance, 
of a particular lurid or appalling light, to illustrate an incident 
in itself terrible, or of a particular tone of pure color to prepare 
the mind for the expression of refined and delicate feeling ; and, 
in a still higher sense, the invention of such incidents and 
thoughts as can be expressed in Avords as well as on canvas, 
and are totally independent of any means of art but such as may 
sei've for the bare suggestion of them. The principal object in 
the foreground of Turner's " Building of Carthage" is a group 
of children sailing toy boats. The exquisite choice of this 
incident, as expressive of the ruling passion, Avhich was to be 
the source of future greatness, in preference to the tumult of 
busy stone-masons or arming soldiers, is quite as appreciable 

1 1* 



250 PAINTING. 

when it is told as when it is seen, — it has nothing to do with the 
technicalities of painting ; a scratch of the pen would have 
conveyed the idea and spoken to the intellect as mnch as the 
elaborate realizations of color. Such a thought as this is some- 
thing far above all art ; it is epic poetry of the highest order. 

By the term " ideas of relation," then, I mean in future to 
express all those sources of pleasure, which involve and require, 
at the instant of their perception, active exertion of the intel- 
lectual powers. 

Subhmity is not a specific term, — not a term descriptive of 
the effect of a particular class of ideas. Anything which 
elevates the mind is sublime, and the elevation of mind is ! 
produced by the contemplation of greatness of any kind ; but 
chiefly, of course, by the greatness of the noblest things. 
Sublimity is, therefore, only another word for the effect of 
greatness upon the feelings. Greatness of matter, space, power, 
virtue, or beauty, are thus all sublime ; and there is perhaps no 
desirable quality of a work of art, which in its perfection is not, 
in some way or degree, sublime. 

I am fully prepared to allow of much ingenuity in Burke's 
theory of the sublime, as connected with self-preservation. 
There are few things so great as death ; and there is perhaps 
nothing which banishes all littleness of thought and feeling in 
an equal degree with its contemplation. Everything, therefore, 
which in any Avay points to it, and, therefore, most dangers 
and powers over which we have little control, are in some 
degree sublime. But it is not the fear, observe, but the con- 
templation of death ; not the instinctive shudder and struggle 
of selt-p reservation, but the deliberate measurement of the 
doom, which are really great or sublime in feeling. It is not 
while we shrink, but while we defy, that we receive or convey 
the highest conceptions of the fate. There is no sublimity in 
the agony of terror. Whether do we trace it most in the cry 



IDEAS OF RELATION. 251 

to the mountams, "fall on us," and to the hills, "cover us," or 
in the calmness of the prophecy — "And though after my skin 
worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall see God ?" 
A Uttle reflection will easily convince any one, that so far from 
the feelings of self-preservation being necessary to the sublime, 
theii' greatest action is totally destructive of it ; and that there 
are few feelings less capable of its perception than those of a 
coward. But the simple conception or idea of greatness of 
sufiering or extent of destruction is sublime, whether there be 
any connection of that idea with ourselves or not. If we were 
placed beyond the reach of all peril or pain, the perception of 
these agencies in theii* influence on others would not be less 
sublime, not because peril or pain are subUiue in their own 
nature, but because their contemplation, exciting compassion 
or fortitude, elevates the mind, and renders meanness of 
thought impossible. 

The truths of nature are one eternal change — one infinite 
variety. There is no bush on the face of the globe exactly 
like another bush ; — there are no two trees in the forest whose 
boughs bend into the same network, nor two leaves on the 
same tree which could not be told one from the other, nor two 
waves in the sea exactly alike. And out of this mass of 
various, yet agreeing beauty, it is by long attention only that 
the conception of the constant character — the ideal form — 
hinted at by all, yet assumed by none, is fixed upon the ima- 
gination for its standai'd of truth. 

It is not singular, therefore, nor in any way disgraceful, that 
the majority of spectators are totally incapable of appreci- 
ating the truth of nature, when fully set before them ; but it 
is both singular and disgraceful that it is so difiicult to con- 
vince them of their own incapability. Ask the connoisseur, 
who has scampered over all Europe, the shape of the leaf of 
an elm, and the chances are ninety to one that he cannot tell 



252 PAINTING. 

you ; and yet he will be voluble of criticism on every painted 
landscape from Dresden to Madrid, and pretend to tell you 
whether they are Uke nature or not. Ask an enthusiastic 
chatterer in the Sistine Chapel, how many ribs he has, and 
you get no answer ; but it is odds that you do not get out of 
the door without his informing you that he considers such 
and such a figure badly drawn ! 

A few such interrogations as these might indeed convict, if 
not convince the mass of spectators of incapability, were it 
not for the universal reply, that they can recognize what they 
cannot describe, and feel what is truthful, though they do not 
know what is truth. And this is, to a certain degree, true ; a 
man may recognize the portrait of his friend, though he can- 
not, if you ask him apart, tell you the shape of his nose or the 
height of his forehead ; and every one could tell Nature her- 
self from an imitation ; why not then, it will be asked, what is 
like her from what is not ? For this simple reason, that we 
constantly recognize things by their least important attributes, 
and by help of very few of those : and if these attributes 
exist not in the imitation, though there may be thousands of 
others far higher and more valuable, yet if those be wanting, 
or imperfectly rendered, by which we are accustomed to 
recognize the object, we deny the likeness. 

Mrs. Jameson somewhere mentions the exclamation of a 
lady of her acquaintance, more desirous to fill a pause in con- 
versation than abundant in sources of observation : " What 
an excellent book the Bible is !" This was a very general 
truth indeed ; a truth predicable of the Bible in common 
with many other books, but it certainly is neither striking nor 
important. Had the lady exclaimed — " How evidently is the 
Bible a djvine revelation !" she would have expressed a par- 
ticular truth, one predicable of the Bible only ; but certainly 
far more interesting and important. Had she, on the con 



IDEAS OF RELATIOJ^, 25S 

trary, informed l^s that tlie Bible was a book, she would have 
been still more general, and still less entertaining. If I ask 
any one who somebody else is, and receive for answer that he 
is a man, I get little satisfaction for my pains ; but if I am told 
that he is Sir Isaac Newton, I immediately thank my neighbor 
for his information. The fact is, and the above instances may 
serve at once to prove it if it be not self-evident, that gene- 
rality gives importance to the subject, and limitation or parti- 
cularity to the pt^edicate. If I say that such and such a man 
in China is an opium eater, I say nothing very interesting, 
because my subject (such a man) is particular. If I say that 
all men in China are opium eaters, I say something interesting, 
because my subject (all men) is general. If I say that all men 
in China eat, I say nothing interesting, because my predicate 
(eat) is general. If I say that all men in China eat opium, I 
say something interesting, because my predicate (eat opium) 
is particular. 

Now almost everything which (with reference to a given 
subject) a painter has to ask himself whether he shall repre- 
sent or not, is a predicate. Hence in art, particular truths 
are usually more important than general ones. 

What should we think of a poet who should keep all his 
life repeating' the same thought in different words? and why 
should we be more lenient to the parrot-painter who has 
learned one lesson from the page of nature, and keeps stam- 
mering it out with eternal repetition without turning the leaf? 
Is it less tautology to describe a thing over and over again 
with lines, than it is Avith words ? The teaching of nature is 
as varied and infinite as it is constant ; and the duty of the 
l^ainter' is to watch for every one of her lessons, and to give 
(for human life wiU admit of nothing more) those in which she 
has manifested each of her principles in the most peculiar and 
striking way. The deeper his research and the rarer the phe- 



254 PAINTING. 

nomena he has noted, the more valuable will his works be ; to 
repeat himself, even in a single instance, is treachery to nature, 
for a thousand human Uves would not be enough to give one 
instance of the perfect manifestation of each of her powers ; 
and as for combining or classifying them, as well might a 
preacher expect in one sermon to express and explain every 
divine truth which can be gathered out of God's revelation, as 
a painter expect in one composition to express and illustrate 
every lesson which can be received from God's creation. Both 
are commentators on infinity, and the duty of both is to take 
for each discourse one essential truth, seeking particularly and 
insisting especially on those which are less palpable to ordinary 
observation, and more Ukely to escape an indolent research ; 
and to impress that, and that alone, upon those whom they 
address, with every illustration that can be furnished by their 
knowledge, and every adornment attainable by their power. 
And the real truthfulness of the painter is in proportion to the 
number and variety of the facts he has so illustrated ; those 
facts being always, as above observed, the realization, not the 
violation of a general principle. The quantity of truth is in 
proportion to the number of such facts, and its value and 
instructiveness in proportion to their rarity. All really great 
pictures, therefore, exhibit the general habits of natm-e, mani- 
fested in some peculiar, rare, and beautiful way. 

By Locke's definition of bodies, only bulk, figure, situation, 
and motion or rest of solid parts, are primary qualities. Hence 
all truths of color sink at once into the second rank. He, 
therefore, who has jieglected a truth of foi*m for a truth of 
color, has neglected a greater truth for a less one. 

And that color is indeed a most unimportant characteristic 
of objects, will be farther evident on the slightest considera- 
tion. The color of plants is constantly changing with the sea- 
son, and of everything with the quality of light falling on it ; 



IDEAS OF RELATION. 255 

but the nature and essence of the thing are independent of 
these changes. An oak is an oak, whether green wdth spring 
or red with wdnter ; a dahlia is a dahUa, whether it be yellow 
or crimson ; and if some monster-hunting botanist should ever 
frighten the flower blue, still it will be a dahlia ; but let one 
curve of the petals — one groove of the stamens be wanting, 
and the flower ceases to be the same. Let the roughness of 
the bark and the angles of the boughs be smoothed or dimi- 
nished, and the oak ceases to be an oak ; but let it retain its 
inward structure and outward form, and though its leaves grew 
white, or pink, or blue, or tri-color, it would be a- white oak, 
or a pink oak, or a republican oak, but an oak still. Again, 
color is hardly ever even a possible distinction between two 
objects of the same species. Two trees, of the same kind, at 
the same season, and of the same age, are of absolutely the 
same color ; but they are not of the same form, nor anything 
like it. There can be no difierence in the color of two pieces 
of rock broken from the same place ; but it is impossible they 
should be of the same form. So that form is not only the 
chief characteristic of species, but the only characteristic of 
individuals of a species. Again, a color, in association with 
other colors, is difierent from the same color seen by itsel£ 
It has a distinct and peculiar power upon the retina dependent 
on its association. Consequently, the color of any object is 
not more dependent upon the nature of the object itself, and 
the eye beholding it, than on the color of the objects near it ; 
in this respect also, therefore, it is no characteristic. 

Invention is in landscaj^e nothing more than appropriate 
recollection — (good in proportion as it is distinct.) Then let 
the details of the foreground be separately studied, especially 
those plants which appear peculiar to the place : if any one, 
however unimportant, occurs there, which occurs not else- 
where, it should occupy a prominent position ; for the other 



256 PAINTING. 

details, the highest examples of the ideal forms* or characters 
which he requires are to be selected by the artist from his 

* " Talk of improving nature when it is nature — Nonsense." — E. V. Rip- 
pingille. I have not yet spoken of the difference — even in what we com- 
monly call Nature — between imperfect and ideal form : the study of thia 
difficult question must, of course, be deferred until we have examined the 
nature of our impressions of beauty ; but it may not be out of place here to 
hint at tlie want of care in many of our artists to distinguish between the 
real work of nature and the diseased results of man's interference with her. 
Many of the works of our greatest artists have for their subjects nothing but 
hacked and hewn remnants of farm-yard vegetation, branded root and branch, 
from their birth, by the prong and the pruning-hook ; and the feelings once 
accustomed to take pleasure in such abortions, can scarcely become percep- 
tive of forms truly ideal. I have just said (417) that young painters should 
go to nature trustingly, — rejecting nothing, and selecting nothing : so they 
should ; but they must be careful tliat it is nature to whom they go — nature 
in her liberty — not as servant-of-all-work in the hands of the agriculturist, 
nor stiffened into court-dress by the landscape gardener. It must be the pure, 
wild volition and energy of the creation which they follow — not subdued to 
tlie furrow, and cicatrized to the pollard — not persuaded into proprieties, nor 
pampered into diseases. Let them work by the torrent side, and in the forest 
shadows; not by purling brooks and under "tensile shades. ' It is impossi- 
ble to enter here into discussion of what man can or cannot do, by assisting na- 
tural operations : it is an intricate question : nor can I, without anticipating 
what I shall have hereafter to advance, show how or why it happens that 
the race horse is not the artist's ideal of a horse, nor a prize tulip his ideal of 
a flower ; but so it is. As far as the painter is concerned, man never touches 
nature but to spoil ; he operates on her as a barber would on the Apollo ; 
and if he sometimes increases some particular power or excellence, — strength 
or agility in the animal, tallness, or fruitfulness, or soUdity in the tree. — he 
invariably loses that balance of good qualities which is the chief sign of per- 
fect specific form ; above all, he destroys the appearance of free volition and 
felicity, which, as I shall sliow hereafter, is one of the essential characters of 
organic beauty. Until, however, T can enter into the discussion of the 
nature of beauty, tlio only advice I can safely give the young painter, is to 
keep clear of clover-fields and parks, and to hold to the unpenetrated forest 
and tlie unfurrowed hill. There he will find that every influence is noble^ 



IDEAS OP RELATION. 257 

former studies, or fresh studies made expressly for the pur 
pose, leaving as little as possible — beyond their connection and 
arrangement — to mere imagination. When his picture is per- 
fectly realized in all its parts, let him dash as much of it out 
as he likes ; throw, if he will, mist around it, darkness, oi 
dazzling and confused light — whatever, in fact, impetuous 
feeling or vigorous imagination may dictate or desire ; the 
forms, once so laboriously realized, will come out, whenever 
they do occur, with a startling and impressive truth, which 
the uncertainty in which they are veiled will enhance rather 
than diminish, and the imagination strengthened by discipline, 
and fed with truth, will achieve the utmost of creation that is 
possible to finite mind. 

Our landscapes are all descriptive, not reflective ; agreeable 
and conversational, but not impressive nor didactic They 
have no other foundation than 

" That vivacious versatility, 
Which many people take for want of heart. 
They err ; 'tis merely what is called ' mobility ;' 
A thing of temperament, and not of art, 
Though seeming so from its supposed facility. 

This makes your actors, artists, and romancers; 
Little that's great — but much of what is clever." 

Only it is to be observed that — in painters — this vivacity is 
not always versatile. It is to be wished that it were, but it is 

even when destructive — that decay itself is beautiful, — and that, in the ela- 
borate and lovely composition of all things, if at first sight it seem less 
studied than the works of men, the appearance of Art is only prevented by 
the presence of Power. 

" Nature never did betray 
The heart that loved her : 'tis her privilege 
Through all the years of this our life to lead 
From joy to joy." 



258 PAINTING. 

no such easy matter to be versatile in painting. SLallowness 
of thought insures not its variety, nor rapidity of production 
its originaUty. 

Let then every picture be painted with earnest intention of 
impressing on the spectator some elevated emotion, and ex- 
hibiting to him some one particular, but exalted, beauty. Let 
a real subject be carefully selected, in itself suggestive of, and 
replete with, this feehng and beauty. AU repetition is degra- 
dation of the art ; it reduces it from head work to handwork ; 
and indicates something like a persuasion on the part of the 
artist that nature is exhaustible or art perfectible ; perhaps, 
even, by him exhausted and perfected. AU copyists are con- 
temptible, but the copyist of himself the most so, for he has 
the worst original. 

In the range of inorganic nature, I doubt if any object can 
be found more perfectly beautiful than a fresh, deep snow- 
drift, seen under warm hglit. Its curves are of inconceivable 
perfection and changefulness, its surface and transparency 
alike exquisite, its light and shade of inexhaustible variety 
and inimitable finish, the shadows sharp, pale, and of heavenly 
color, the reflected lights intense and multitudinous, and min- 
gled with the sweet occurrences of transmitted Hght. No 
mortal hand can approach the majesty or loveliness of it, yet 
it is possible by care and skill at least to suggest the precious- 
uess of its forms and intimate the nature of its light and 
shade ; but this has never been attempted ; it could not be 
fdone except by artists of a rank exceedingly high, and there 
is something about the feeling of snow in ordinary scenery 
which such men do not hke. But Avhen the same quaUties are 
exhibited on a magnificent Alpine scale and in a position 
where they interfere with no feeling of life, I see not why 
they should be neglected, as they have hitherto been, unless 



IDEAS OF EELAriON. 259 

that the difficulty of reconciling the brilliancy of snow with a 
picturesque light and shade, is so great that most good artists 
disguise or avoid the greater part of upper Alpine scenery, 
and hint at the glacier so slightly, that they do not feel the 
necessity of careful study of its forms. Habits of exaggera- 
tion increase the evil : I have seen a sketch from nature, by 
one of the most able of our landscape painters, in which a 
cloud had been mistaken for a snowy summit, and the hint 
thus taken exaggerated, as was likely, into an enormous mass 
of impossible height, and unintelligent form, when the moun- 
tain itself, for which the cloud had been mistaken, though 
subtending an angle -of about eighteen or twenty degrees, 
instead of the fifty attributed to it, was of a form so exquisite 
that it might have been a profitable lesson truly studied to 
Phidias. Nothing but failure can result from such methods of 
sketching, nor have I ever seen a single instance of an earnest 
study of snowy mountains by any one. Hence, wherever 
they are introduced, their drawing is utterly iminteUigent, the 
forms being those of white rocks, or of rocks lightly pow- 
dered with snow, showing sufficiently that not only the paint- 
ers have never studied the mountain carefully from below, 
but that they have never climbed into the snowy region. 

A man accustomed to the broad, wild sea-shore, with its 
bright breakers, and free winds, and sounding rocks, and eter- 
nal sensation of tameless pow^r, can scarcely but be angered 
when Claude bids him stand still on some paltry, chipped and 
chiselled quay, with porters and wheelbarrows running against 
him, to watch a weak, rippling, bound and barriered water, 
that has not strength enough in one of its waves to upset the 
fiowcr-pots on the Avail, or even to fling one jet of spray over 
the confining stone. A man accustomed to the strength and 
glory of God's mountams, with their soaring and radiant pin- 



260 PAINTING. 

nacles, and surging sweeps of measureless distance, kit gdoma 
in their valleys, and climates upon tlieir crests, can scarcely 
but be angered when Salvator bids him stand still under 
some contemptible fragment of splintery crag, which an Alpine 
snow-wreath would smother in its first swell, with a stunted 
bush or two growing out of it, and a volume of manufactory 
smoke for a sky, A man accustomed to the grace and infinity 
of nature's foliage, with every vista a cathedral, and every 
bough a revelation, can scarcely but be angered when Poussin 
mocks him with a black round mass of impenetrable paint, 
diverging into feathers instead of leaves, and supported on a 
stick instead of a trunk. The fact is, there is one thing want- 
ing in all the doing of these men, and that is the very virtue 
by which the work of human mind chiefly rises above that of 
the Daguerreotype or Calotype, or any other mechanical 
means that ever have been or may be invented. Love : There 
is no evidence of their ever having gone to nature with any 
tliirst, or receive from her such emotion as could make them, 
even for an instant, lose sight of themselves ; there is in them 
neither earnestness nor humility ; there is no simple or honest 
record of any single truth ; none of the plain words nor straight 
efforts that men speak and make when they once feel. 

Nor is it only by the professed landscape painters that the 
great verities of the material world are betrayed : Grand as 
are the motives of landscape in the works of the earlier and 
mightier men, there is yet in them nothing approaching to a 
general view nor complete rendering of natural phenomena ; 
rot that they are to be blamed for this ; for they took out of 
nature that which was fit for their purpose, and their mission 
was to do no more ; but we must be cautious to distinguish 
that imaginative abstraction of landscape which alone we find 
in them, from the entire statement of truth which has been 
attempted by the moderns. I have said in the chapter on 



IDEAS OF RELATION. 261 

symmetry in the second volume, that all landscape grrmdeur 
vanishes before that of Titian and Tintoi'et ; and this is true 
of whatever these two giants touched; — but they touched 
little. A few level flakes of chestnut foliage ; a blue abstrac- 
tion of hill forms from Cadore or the Euganeans; a grand 
mass or two of glowing ground and mighty herbage, and a 
i'Gw burning fields of quiet cloud were all they needed ; there 
is evidence of Tintoret's having felt more than this, but it 
occurs only in secondary fragments of rock, cloud, or pine, 
hardly noticed among the accumulated interest of his human 
subject. From the Avindow of Titian's house at Venice, the 
chain of the Tyroles« Alps is seen lifted in spectral power 
aboA^e the tufted plain of Treviso ; every dawn that reddens 
the towers of Murano lights also a line of pyramidal fires along 
that colossal ridge ; but there is, so far as I know, no evidence 
in any of the master's works of his ever having beheld, much 
less felt, the majesty of their burning. The dark firmament 
and saddened twilight of Tintoret are suflicient for their end; 
but the svui never plunges behind San Giorgio in Aliga with- 
out such retinue of radiant cloud, such rest of zoned light on 
the green lagoon, as never received image from his hand. 

The modern Italians will paint every leaf of a laurel or rose- 
bush without the slightest feeling of their beauty or character ; 
and without showing one spark of intellect or affection from 
beginning to end. Anything is better than this ; and yet the 
very highest schools do the same thing, or nearly so, but with 
totally different motives and perceptions, and the result is 
divine. On the whole, I conceive that the extremes of good 
and evil lie with the finishers, and that whatever glorious 
power we may admit in men like Tintoret, whatever attrac- 
tiveness of method to Rubens, Rembrandt, or, though in far 
less degree, our own Reynolds, still the thoroughly great men 



2 02 PAINTING. 

are those who have dorte everything thoroughly, and wlio, in 
a word, have never despised any thing, however small, of God's 
making. And this is the chief fault of our English landscapists, 
that they have not the intense all-observing penetration of 
well-balanced mind; they have not, except in one or two 
instances, anything of that feeling which Wordsworth shows 
in the following lines : — 

" So fair, so sweet, withal so sensitive ; — 
Would that the little flowers were bora to live 
Conscious of half the pleasure which they give. 
That to this mountain daisy's self were known 
The beauty of its star-shaped shadOiv, thrown 
On the smooth surface of this naked stone." 

That is a little bit of good, downright, foreground paint- 
ing — no mistake about it; daisy, and shadow, and stone 
texture and all. Our painters must come to this before they 
have done their duty ; and yet, on the other hand, let them 
beware of finishing, for the sake of finish, all over their picture. 
The ground is not to be all over daisies, nor is every daisy to 
have its star-shaped shadow ; there is as much finish in the right 
concealment of things as in the right exhibition of them ; and 
while I demand this amount of specific character where nature 
shows it, I demand equal fidelity to her where she conceals it. 

But the painter who really loves nature will not, on this 
account, give you a faded and feeble image, which indeed may 
appear to you to be right, because your feelings can detect 
•no discrepancy in its parts, but which he knows to derive its 
apparent truth from a systematized falsehood. No ; he will 
make you understand and feel that art cannot imitate nature 
— that where it appears to do so, it must malign her, and 
mock her. He will give you, or state to you, such truths as 
are in his power, completely and perfectly ; and those which 



IDEAS OF RELATION. 2G3 

he cannot give, he will leave to your imagination. If you are 
acquainted with nature, you will know all he has given to be 
true, and you wall supply from your memory and from your 
heart that light which he cannot give. If you are unac- 
quainted with nature, seek elsewhere for whatever may hap 
pen to satisfy yoiir feelings; but do not ask for the truth 
which you would not acknowledge and could not enjoy. 

And must it ever be otherwise with painting, for otherwise 
it has ever been. Her subjects have been regarded as mere 
themes on which the artist's power is to be displayed ; and 
that power, be it of imitation, composition, idealization, or of 
whatever other kind, is the chief object of the spectator's 
observation. It is man and his fancies, man and his trickeries, 
man and his inventions, — poor, paltry, weak, self-sighted man, 
which the connoisseur for ever seeks and worships. Among 
potsherds and dunghills, among drunken boors and withered 
beldames, through every scene of debaucheiy and degradation, 
we follow the erring artist, not to receive one A\holesome les- 
son, not to be touched with pity, nor moved with indignation, 
but to watch the dexterity of the pencil, and gloat over the 
glittering of the hue. 

I speak not only of the works of the Flemish School — I wage 
no war WTth their admirers ; they may be left in peace to 
count the spicuke of haystacks and the hairs of donkeys — it is 
also of works of real mind that I speak, — works in which there 
are evidences of genius and workings of power, — works which 
have been held up as containing all of the beautiful that art 
can reach or man conceive. And I assert with sorrow, that 
all hitherto done in landscape, by those commonly conceived 
its masters, has never prompted one holy thought in the minds 
of nations. It has begun and ended in exhibiting the dexteri- 
ties of individuals, and conventionalities of systems. Filling 



264 PAINTING. 

the world with the honor 'of Claude and Salvator, it has never 
once tended to the honor of God. 

Does the reader start in reading these last words, as if they 
were those of wild enthusiasm, — as if I were lowering the dig- 
nity of religion by supposuig that its cause could be advanced 
by such means ? His surprise proves my position. It does 
sound like wild, like absurd enthusiasm, to expect any definite 
moral agency in the painters of landscape ; but ought it so to 
sound ? Are the gorgeousness of the visible hue, the glory of 
the realized form, instruments in the artist's hand so ineffective, 
that they can answer no nobler purpose than the amusement 
of curiosity, or the engagement of idleness ? Must it not be 
owing to gross neglect or misapplication of the means at his 
command, that while words and tones (means of representing 
nature surely less powerful than lines and colors) can kindle and 
purify the very inmost souls of men, the painter can only hope 
to entertain by his efforts at expression, and must remain for 
ever brooding over his incommunicable thoughts ? 

The cause of the evil lies, I believe, deep-seated in the sys- 
tem of ancient landscape art ; it consists, in a word, in the 
painter's taking upon him to modify God's works at his plea- 
sure, casting the shadow of himself on all he sees, constituting 
himself arbiter where it is honor to be a disciple, and exhibit- 
ing his ingenuity by the attainment of combinations whose 
highest praise is that they are impossible. 

Every herb and flower of the field has its specific, distinct, 
and perfect beauty ; it has its peculiar habitation, expression, 
and function. The highest art is that which seizes this specific 
character, which developes and illustrates it, which assigns to 
it its proper position in the landscape, and which, by means 
of it, enhances and enforces the great impression which the 
picture is intended to convey. 

Again, it does not follow that because such accurate know- 



CHIAROSCURO. 265 

ledge is necessary to the painter that it should constitute the 
jDainter; nor that such knowledge is valuable in itself, and 
"without reference to high ends. Every kind of knowledge 
may be sought from ignoble motives, and for ignoble ends ; 
and in those who so possess it, it is ignoble knowledge ; while the 
very same knowledge is in another mind an attainment of the 
highest dignity, and conveying the greatest blessing. This is 
the difference between the mere botanist's knowledge of plants, 
and the great poet's or painter's knowledge of them. The 
one notes their distinctions for the sake of swelling his herba- 
rium ; the other, that he may render them vehicles of expres- 
sion and emotion. 



CHIABOSCUBO. 



Go out some bright sunny day in winter, and look for a 
tree with a broad trunk, having rather delicate boughs hang- 
ing down on the sunny side, near the trunk. Stand four or 
five yards from it, with your back to the sun. You will find 
that the boughs between you and the trunk of the tree are 
very indistmct, that you confound them in places with the 
trunk itself, and cannot possibly trace one of them from its 
insertion to its extremity. But the shadows Avhich they cast 
upon the trunk, you will find clear, dark, and distinct, per- 
fectly traceable through their whole course, except when they 
are interrupted by the crossing boughs. And if you retire 
backwards, you will come to a point where you cannot see the 
intervening boughs at all, or only a fragment of them here 
and there, but can still see their shadows perfectly plain. 
Now, this may serve to show you the immense prominence 
and importance of shadows where there is anything like bright 
liglit. Tliey are, in fact, commonly far more conspicuous than 

12 



266 PAINTING. 

the thing which casts them, for being as large as the casting 
object, and altogether made up of a blackness deeper than the 
darkest part of the casting object, (while that object is also 
broken up with positive and reflected lights,) their large, 
broad, unbroken spaces, tell strongly on the eye, especially as 
all form is rendered partially, often totally invisible within 
them, and as they are suddenly terminated by the sharpest 
lines which nature ever shows. For no outline of objects 
whatsoever is so sharp as the edge of a close shadow. Put 
your finger over a piece of white paper in the sun, and 
observe the difference between the softness of the outline of 
the finger itself and the decision of the edge of the shadow. 
And note also the excessive gloom of the latter. A piece of 
black cloth, laid in the light, Avill not attain one-fourth of the 
blackness of the paper vmder the shadow. 

Hence shadows are in reality, when the sun is shining, the 
most conspicuous thing in a landscape, next to the highest 
lights. All forms are understood and explained chiefly by 
their agency: the roughness of the bark of a tree, for instance, 
is not seen in the light, nor in the shade; it is only seen 
between the two, where the shadows of the ridges explain it. 
And hence, if we have to express vivid light, our very first 
aina must be to get the shadows sharj) and visible. 

The second point to which I wish at present to direct 
attention has reference to the arrangement of light and shade. 
It is the constant habit of nature to use both her highest 
lights and deepest shadows in exceedingly small quantity ; 
always in points, never in masses. She will give a large mass 
«)f tender light in sky or water, impressive by its quantity, 
and a large mass of tender shadow relieved against it, in 
foliage, or hill, or building; but the light is always subdued 
if it be extensive — the shadow always feeble if it be broad. 
She will then fill up all the rest of her picture with middle 



CHIAROSCURO. 267 

tints and pale grays of some sort or another, and on this quiet 
and harmonious whole, she wUl touch her high lights in spots 
— the foam of an isolated wave — ^the sail of a solitary vessel 
—the flash of the sun from a wet roof — the gleam of a single 
white-washed cottage — or some such sources of local bril- 
liancy, she will use so vividly and delicately as to throw every- 
thing else into definite shade by comparison. And then 
taking up the gloom, she will use the black hollows of some 
overhanging bank, or the black dress of some shaded figure, 
or the depth of some sunless chink of wall or window, so 
sharply as to throw everything else into definite light by com- 
parison ; thus reducing the whole mass of her picture to a 
delicate middle tint, approaching, of course, here to light, and 
there to gloom ; but yet sharply separated from the utmost 
degrees cither of the one or the other. None are in the right 
road to real excellence, but those who are - struggling to 
render the simplicity, purity, and inexhaustible variety of 
nature's own chiaroscuro in open, cloudless daylight, giving 
the expanse of harmonious Ught — the speaking, decisive 
shadow — and the exquisite grace, tenderness, and grandeur 
of aerial opposition of local color and equally illuminated 
lines. No chiaroscuro is so difiicult as this; and none so 
noble, chaste, or unpressive. On this part of the subject, how- 
ever, I must not enlarge at present. I wish now only to speak 
of those great principles of chiaroscuro, which nature observes, 
even when she is most working for effect — when she is play- 
ing with thunderclouds and sunbeams, and throwing one 
thing out and obscuring another, with the most marked artis- 
tieal feeling and intention ; — even then, she never forgets her 
great rule, to give precisely the same quantity of deepest 
shade which she does of highest light, and no more ; points 
of the one answering to points of the other, and both vividly 
conspicuous and separated from all the rest of the landscape. 



268 PAINTING. 



tintoeet's massacre or the innocents. 

Of Raffaelle's treatment of the massacre of the innocents, 
Fuseli affirms that, "in dramatic gradation he disclosed all the 
mother through every image of pity and of terror." If this he 
so, I think the philosophical spirit has prevailed over the 
imaginative. The imagination never errs, it sees all that is, j 
and all the rehations and bearings of it, but it would not have 
confused the mortal frenzy of maternal terror with various 
development of maternal character. Fear, rage, and agony, at 
their utmost pitch, sweep away all character : humanity itself 
would be lost in maternity, the woman would become the mere 
personification of animal fury or fear. For this reason all the 
ordinary representations of this subject are, I think, false and 
cold : the artist has not heard the shrieks, nor mingled with 
the fugitives, he has sat down in his study to twist features 
methodically, and philosophize over insanity. Not so Tintoret. 
Knowing or feeling, that the expression of the human face was 
in such circumstances not to be rendered, and that the effort 
could only end in an ugly falsehood, he denies himself all aid 
from the features, he feels that if he is to place himself or us in 
the midst of that maddened multitude, there can be no time 
allowed for watching expression. Still less does he depend on 
details of murder or ghastUness of death ; there is no blood, 
no stabbing or cutting, but there is an awful substitute for 
these in the chiaroscuro. The scene is the oiiter A'estibule of a 
palace, the slippery marble floor is fearfully barred across by 
sanguine shadows, so that our eyes seem to become bloodshot 
and strained with strange horror and deadly vision ; a lake of 
life before them, like the burning seen of the doomed Moabite 
on the water that came by the way of Edom; a huge flight of 
stairs, without parapet, descends on the left; down this rush a 



TINTOEEX'S MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. 269 

crowd of women mixed with the murderers ; the child in the 
arms of one has been seized by the limbs, she hurls herself over 
the edge, and falls head downmost, dragging the child out of 
the grasp by her weight ; — she will be dashed dead in a second : 
two others are farther in flight, they reach the edge of a deep 
river, — the water is beat into a hollow by the force of their 
plunge ; — close to us is the great struggle, a heap of the mothers 
entangled m one mortal writhe with each other and the swords, 
one of the murderers dashed down and crushed beneath them, 
the sword of another caught by the blade and dragged at by a 
woman's naked hand ; the youngest and foirest of the women, 
her child just torn away from a death grasp and cl:T.sped to her 
breast with the grip of a steel vice, falls backwards helplessly 
over the heap, right on the sword points ; all knit together 
and hurled down in one hopeless, frenzied, furious abandonment 
of body and soul in the effort to save. Their shrieks ring in our 
ears till the marble seems rending around us, but far back at 
the bottom of the stairs, there is something in the shadow like 
a heap of clothes. It is a woman, sitting quiet, — quite quiet — 
still as any stone, she looks down steadfastly on her dead child, 
laid along on the floor before her, and her hand is pressed 
softly upon her brow. 

All the parts of a noble work must be separately imperfect ; 
each must imply, and ask for all the rest, and the glory of 
every one of them must consist in its relation to the rest, neither 
while so much as one is Avanting can any be right. And it is 
evidently impossible to conceive in each separate feature, a 
certain want or wrongness which can only be corrected by the 
other features of the picture, (not by one or two merely, but 
by all,) unless together Avith the want, Ave conceive also of 
what is wanted, that is of all the rest of the work or picture. 
Hence Fuseli : — 



270 PAINTIXG. 

" Second thoughts are admissible in painting and poetry 
only as dressers of the first conception j no great idea was ever 
formed in fragments." 



THE BAPTISM OF CHRIST. 

Tintoret has thrown into it his utmost strength, and it 
becomes noble in his hands by his most singularly imaginative 
expression, not only of the immediate fact, but of the whole 
train of thought of which it is suggestive ; and by his con- 
sidering the baptism not only as the submission of Christ to the 
fulfilment of all righteousness, but as the opening of the earthly 
struggle with the prince of the powers of the air, which instantly 
beginning in the temptation, ended only on the cross. 

The river flows fiercely under the shadow of a great rock. 
From its opposite shore, thickets of close, gloomy foliage rise 
against the rolling chasm of heaven, through Avhich breaks the 
brightness of the descending Spirit. Across these, dividing 
them asunder, is stretched a horizontal floor of flaky cloud, on 
which stand the hosts of heaven. Christ kneels upon the 
water, and does not sink ; the figure of St. John is indistinct, 
but close beside his raised right arm there is a spectre in the 
black shade ; the fiend, harpy-shaped, hardly seen, glares down 
upon Christ with eyes of fire, waiting his time. Beneath this 
figure there comes out of the mist a dark hand, the arm unseen, 
extended to a net in the river, the spars of which are in the 
shape of a cross. Behind this the roots and under stems of the 
trees are cut away by the cloud, and beneath it, and through 
them, is seen a vision of wild, melancholy, boundless light, the 
sweep of the desert, and the figure of Christ is seen therein 
alone, with his arms lifted as in supplication or ecstacy, borne 
of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. 



THE IDEAL OF UUMANITY. 271 



THE IDEAL OF UUMANITY. 



The right ideal is to be reached, we have asserted, only ly 
the banishment of the immediate signs of sin upon the coun- 
tenance and body. How, therefore, are the signs of sin to be 
known and separated ? 

No intellectual operation is here of any avail. There is not 
any reasoning by which the evidences of depravity are to be 
tiaced in movements of muscle or forms of feature ; there is not 
any knowledge, nor experience, nor diligence of comparison 
that can be of avail. Here, as throughout the operation of the 
theoretic faculty, the perception is altogether moral, an instinc- 
tive love and clinging to the lines of hght. Nothing but love 
can read the letters, nothuig but sympathy catch the sound, 
there is no pure passion that can be understood or pamted 
except by pureness of heart ; the foul or blunt feehng will see 
itself in everything, and set down blasphemies. 

God has employed certain colors in His creation as the 
unvarying accompaniment of all that is purest, most innocent, 
and most precious ; while for things precious only in material 
uses, or dangerous, common colors are reserved. Consider 
for a little while what sort of a world it would be if all flowers 
were grey, all leaves black, and the sky brown. Observe how 
constantly innocent things are bright in color ; look at a dove's 
neck, and compare it with the grey back of a viper ; I have 
often heard talk of brilliantly colored serpents ; and I suppose 
there are such, — as there are gay poisons, like the foxglove and 
kalmia — types of deceit ; but all the venomous serpents I have 
really seen are grey, brick-red, or brown, variously mottled; 
and the most awful serpent I have seen, the Egyptian asp, is 
precisely of the color of gravel, or only a little greyer. So, 



272 PAINTING. 

again, the crocodile and alligator are grey, but the innocent 
lizard green and beautiful. I do not mean that the rule is 
invariable, otherwise it would be more convincing than the 
lessons of the natural universe are intended ever to be ; there 
are beautiful coloi-s on the leopard and tiger, and in the ber- 
ries of the nightshade ; and there is nothing very notable in 
brilhancy of color either in sheep or cattle (though, by the 
way, the velvet of a brown bull's hide in the sun, or the tawny 
white of the Italian oxen, is, to my mind, lovelier than any 
leopard's or tiger's skin) : but take a wider view of nature, 
and compare generally rainbows, sunrises, roses, violets, but- 
terflies, birds, gold-fish, rubies, opals, and corals, with alliga- 
tors, hippopotami, lions, wolves, bears, swine, sharks, slugs, 
bones, fungi, fogs, and corrupting, stinging, destroying things 
in general, and you will feel then how the question stands 
between the colorists and chiaroscurists, — which of them have 
nature and life on their side, and which have sin and death. 

"We have been speaking hitherto of what is constant and 
necessary in nature, of the ordinary effects of daylight on 
ordinary colors, and we repeat again, that no gorgeousness of 
the pallet can reach even these. But it is a widely different 
thing when nature herself takes a coloring fit, and does some- 
thing extraordinary, something really to exhibit her power. 
She has a thousand ways and means of rising above herself, 
but incomparably the noblest manifestations of her capability 
of color are in the sunsets among the high clouds. I speak 
especially of the moment before the sun sinks, when his light 
turns pure rose-color, and when this light falls upon a zenith 
covered with countless cloudforms of inconceivable delicacy, 
threads and flakes of vapor, which would in common dayhght 
be pure snow white, and which give therefore fair field to the 
tone of light. There is then no limit to the multitude, and no 



THE IDEAL OF HUMANITY. 273 

check to the intensity of the hues assumed. The whole sky 
from the zenith to the horizon becomes one molten, mantling 
sea of color and fire ; every black bar turns into massy gold, 
every ripple and wave into unsullied, shadowless crimson* and 
purple, and scarlet, and colors for which there are no words 
in language, and no ideas in the mind, — things which can only 
be conceived while they are visible, — the intense hollow blue 
of the upper sky melting through it all, — showing here deep, 
and pure, and lightless, there, modulated by the filmy, form- 
less body of the transparent vapor, till it is lost imperceptibly 
in its crimson and gold. 

The concurrence of circumstances necessary to produce the 
sunsets of which I speak does not take place above five or six 
times in a summer, and then only for a space of from five to 
.ten minutes, just as the sun reaches the horizon. Considering 
how seldom people thmk of looking for sunset at all, and how 
seldom, if they do, they are in a position from which it can be 
fully seen, the chances that their attention should be awake, 
and their position favorable, during these few flying instants 
of the year, is almost as nothing. What can the citizen, who 
can see only the red light on the canvas of the wagon at the 
end of the street, and the crimson color of the bricks of his 
neighbor's chimney, know of tlie flood of fire which deluges 
the sky from the horizon to the zenitli ? What can even the 
quiet inhabitant of the English loA\lands, whose scene for the 
manifestation of the fire of heaven is limited to the tops of 
hayricks, and the rooks' nests in the old elm-trees, know of 
the mighty passages of splendor which are tossed from Alp to 
Alp over the azure of a thousand miles of champaign ? Even 
granting the constant vigor of observation, and supposing the 
possession of such impossible knowledge, it needs but a 
moment's reflection to prove how incapable the memory is of 
retainmg for any time the distinct image of the sources even 

12* 



2V4 PAINTING. 

of its most vivid impressions. What recollection have we of 
the sunsets which delighted us last year ? We may know 
that they were magnificent, or glowing, but no distinct image 
of color or form is retained — nothing of whose degree (for the 
great difficulty with the memory is to retain, not facts, but 
degrees of fact) we could be so certain as to say of anything 
now presented to us, that it is like it. If we did say so, Ave 
should be Avrong ; for Ave may be quite certain that the energy 
of an impression fades from the memory, and becomes more 
and more indistinct every day ; and thus we compare a faded 
and indistinct image Avith the decision and certainty of one 
present to the senses. 

Recognition is no proof of real and intrinsic resemblance. 
We recognise our books by their bindings, though the true 
and essential characteristics lie inside. A man is known to 
his dog by the smell — to his tailor by the coat — to his friend 
by the smile : each of these knows him, but how little, or how 
much, depends on the dignity of the intelligence. That Avhich 
is truly and indeed characteristic of the man, is known only 
to God. 

One portrait of a man may possess exact accuracy of fea- 
ture, and no atom of expression ; it may be, to use the ordi- 
nary terms of admiration bestowed on such j^ortraits by those 
whom they please, "as like as it can stare." Everybody, 
down to his cat, would know this. Another portrait may 
have neglected or misrepresented the features, but may have 
given the flash of the eye, and the peculiar radiance of the lip, 
seen on him only in his hours of highest mental excitement. 
None but his friends Avould knoAv this. Another may have 
given none of his ordinary expressions, but one Avhich he Avore 
in the most excited instant of his life, when all his secret pas- 
sions and all his highest i)0\\ers were brouglit into play at 



THE IDEAL OF HUMANITY. 216 

once. • None but those who had then seen him might rcicog- 
nise this as like. But which would be the most truthful por- 
trait of the man? The first gives the accidents of body, the 
sport of climate, and food, and time — which corruption inha- 
bits, and the worm waits for. The second gives the stamp 
of the soul on the flesh ; but it is the soul seen in the 
emotions which it shares with many — which may not be cha- 
racteristic of its essence — the results of habit, and education, 
and accident; a gloze, whether purposely worn, or uncon- 
sciously assumed, perhaps totally contrary to all that is rooted 
and real in the mind that it conceals. The third has caught 
the trace of all that was most hidden and most mighty, when 
all hypocrisy, and all habit, and all petty and passing emotion 
— the ice, and the bank and the foam of the immortal river — 
were shivered and broken, and swallowed up in the awaken- 
ing of its inward strength ; when the call and claim of some 
divine motive had brought into visible being those latent 
forces and feelings Avhich the spirit's own volition could not 
summon, nor its consciousness comprehend ; which God only 
knew, and God only could awaken, — the depth and the mys- 
tery of its peculiar and separating attributes. 

lu a man, to be short-legged or long-nosed, or anything else 
of accidental quality, does not distinguish him from other 
short-legged or long-nosed animals ; but the important truths 
respecting a man are, first, the marked development of that 
distinctive organization which separates him as man from 
other animals, and secondly, that group of qualities which 
distinguish the individual from all other men, which make 
him Pa^ul or Judas, Xewton or Shakspeare. 

That habit of the old and great painters of introducing 
portrait into all their highest works, I look to, not as error in 



2V6 PAINTI^'G. 

them, but as the very source and root of their superiority in 
all things, for they were too great and too humble not to see 
in every face about them that which Avas above them, and 
which no fancies of theirs could match nor take place of; 
wherefore we find the custom of portraiture constant with 
them, both portraiture of study and for purposes of analysis, 
as with Leonardo; and actual, professed, serviceable, hard- 
working portraiture of the men of their time, as with 
Raffaelle, and Titian, and Tintoret. 

There is not any greater sign of the utter want of vitality 
and hopefulness in the schools of the present day than that 
unhappy prettiness and sameness under which they mask, or 
rather for which they barter, in their lentile thirst, all the 
birthright and power of nature, which prettiness, wrought out 
and spun fine in the study, out of empty heads, till it hardly 
betters the blocks on which dresses and hair are tried in 
barbers' windows and millmers' books, cannot but be revolt- 
ing to any man who has his eyes, even in a measure, open to 
the divinity of the immortal seal on the common features that 
he meets in the highways and hedges hourly and momentarily, 
outreaching all eflbrts of conception as all power of realization, 
were it Raffaelle's three times over, even when the glory of 
the wedding garment is not there. ^ 

Public taste, I believe, as far as it is the encourager and 
supporter of art, has been the same in all ages, — a fitful and 
vacillating current of vague impression, perpetually liable to 
change, subject to epidemic desires, and agitated by infectious 
passion, the slave of fashion, and the fool of fancy, but yet 
always distinguishing with singular clearsightedness, between 
that which is best and that which is worst of the particular class 
of food which its morbid appetite may call for ; never failing tc 



TUK IDEAL OF HUMANITY. 277 

distinguish that which is produced by intellect, from that which 
is not, though it may be intellect degraded by ministering to ita 
misguided will. Public taste may thus degrade a race of men 
capable of the highest efforts in art into the portrait painters 
of ephemeral fashions, but it will yet not fail of discovering who 
among these portrait painters is the man of the most mind. It 
will separate the man who would have become Buonaroti from 
the man who would have become Bandinelli, though it will 
employ both in painting curls, and feathers, and bracelets. 
Hence, generally speaking, there is no comparative injustice 
done, no false elevation of the fool above the jnau of mind, 
provided only that the man of mind will condescend to supply 
the particular article which the public chooses to want. Of 
course a thousand modifying circumstances interfere with the 
action of the general rule ; but, taking one case with another, 
we shall very constantly find the price which the picture 
commands in the market a pretty fair standard of the artist's 
rank of intellect. The press, theiefore^ and all ^^'ho pretend to 
lead the public taste, have not so much to direct the multitude 
whom to go to, as what to ask for. Their business is not to tell 
us which is our best painter, but to tell us whether we are 
making our best painter do his best. 

Now none are capable of doing this, but those whose 
principles of judgment are based both on thorough j^ractical 
knowledge of art, and on broad general views of what is true 
and right, Avithout reference to what has been done at one time 
or another, or in one school or another. Nothing can be more 
perilous to the cause of art, than the constant rmging in our 
painters' ei s of the names of great predecessors, as their 
examples or masters. 

One of the most morbid symptoms of the general taste of 
the present day, is a too great fondness for unfinished works. 
Brilliancy and rapidity of execution are everywhcsre sought as 



278 PAINTING. 

the highest good, and so that a picture be cleverly handled aa 
far as it is carried, little regard is paid to its imperfection as a 
whole. Hence some artists are permitted, a»d others compelled, 
to confine themselves to a manner of working altogether 
destructive of their powers, and to tax their energies, not to 
concentrate the greatest quantity of tliought on the least 
j)ossible space of canvas, but to produce the greatest quantity 
of glitter and clap-trap in the shortest possible time. To the 
idler and the trickster in art, no system can be more advan- 
tageous ; but to the man who is really desirous of doing 
something worth having lived for — to a man of industry, energy, 
or feeling, we believe it to be the cause of the most bitter dis- 
couragement. If ever, working upon a favorite subject or a 
beloved idea, he is induced to tax his powers to the utmost, and 
to sj)end as much time upon his picture as he feels necessary 
for its perfection, he will not be able to get so high a price for 
the result, perhaps, of a twelvemonth's thought, as he might 
have obtained for half a dozen sketches with a forenoon's work 
in each, and he is compelled either to fall back upon mechanism, 
or to starve. Now the j^ress should especially endeavor to 
convince the public, that by this purchase of imperfect pictures 
they not only prevent all progress and development of high 
talent, and set tricksters and mechanics on a level with men of 
mind, but defraud and injure themselves. 

There is no doubt whatever, that, estimated merely by the 
quantity of pleasure it is capable of conveying, a well-finished 
picture is worth to its jjossessor half-a-dozen incomplete ones ; 
and that a perfect drawing is, simply as a source of delight, 
better woi'th a hundred guineas than a drawing half as finished 
is worth thirty. On the other hand, the body of our artists 
should be kept in mind, that by indulging the public Avith 
rapid and unconsidered work, they are not only depriving 
themselves of the benefit which each picture ought to render 



THE IDEAL OF HUMANITY. 279 

to them, as a piece of practice and study, but they are 
destroying the refinement of general taste, and rendering it 
impossible for themselves ever to find a market for more 
careful works, supposing that they were inclined to execute 
them. Nor need any single artist be afraid of setting the 
example, and producing labored works, at advanced prices, 
among the cheap, quick drawings of the day. The public 
will soon find the value of the comjjlete work, and will be 
more ready to give a large sum for that which is inexhaustible, 
than a quota of it for that which they are wearied of in a 
month. The artist who never lets the price command the 
picture, will soon find the picture command the price. And 
it ought to be a rule with every painter never to let a picture 
leave his easel while it is yet capable of imi^rovement, or of 
having more thought put into it. The general efiect is often 
perfect and pleasing, and not to be improved i;pon, when the 
details and facts are altogether imperfect and unsatisfactory. 
It may be diflicult — perhaps the most diflicult task of art — to 
complete these details, and not to hurt the general effect ; but 
until the artist can do this, his art is imperfect and his picture 
unfinished. That only is a complete picture which has both 
the general wholeness and effect of nature, and the inexhaus- 
tible perfection of nature's details. And it is only in the 
effort to unite these that a painter really improves. By aim- 
ing only at details, he becomes a mechanic ; by aiming only 
at generals, he becomes a trickster : his fall in both cases is 
sure. Two questions the artist has, therefore, to ask himself, 
— first, " Is my whole right ?" Secondly, " Can my details be 
added to ? Is there a single space in the picture where I can 
crowd in another thought ? Is there a curve in it which I can 
modulate — a line which I can graduate — a vacancy I can fill ? 
Is there a single spot which the eye, by any peering or pr}- 
ing, can fathom or exhaust ? If so, my picture is imperfect. 



280 PAINTING. 

and if, in modulating the line or filling the vacancy, I hurt the 
general eiFect, my art is imperfect." 

But, on the other hand, though incomplete pictures ought 
neither to be produced nor purchased, careful and real sketches 
ought to be valued much more highly than they are. 

If I stand by a picture in the Academy, and hear twenty 
persons in succession admiring some paltry piece of mechanism 
or imitation in the lining of a cloak, or the satin of a slipper, 
it is absurd to tell me that they reprobate collectively what 
they admire individually : or, if they pass with apathy by a 
piece of the most noble conception or most perfect truth, be- 
cause it has in it no tricks of the brush nor grimace of expres- 
sion, it is absurd to tell me that they collectively respect what 
they separately scorn, or that the feelings and knowledge of 
such judges, by any length of time or comparison of ideas, 
could come to any right conclusion with respect to what is 
really high in art. The question is not decided by them, but 
for them ; — decided at first by few : by fewer in jjroportion as 
the merits of the Avork are of a higher order. From these few 
the decision is communicated to the number next below them 
in rank of mind, and by these again to a wider and lower 
circle ; each rank being so far cognizant of the superiority of 
that above it, as to receive its decision with respect ; until, in 
process of time, the right and consistent opinion is communi- 
cated to all, and held by all as a matter of faith, the more 
positively in proportion as the grounds of it are less perceived.* 

* There are, however, a thousand modifying circumstances which render 
this process sometimes unnecessary, — sometimes rapid and certain — some- 
times impossible. It is unnecessary in rhetoric and the drama, because the 
multitude is the only proper judge of those arts whose end is to move the 
multitude, (though more is necessary to a fine play than is essentially dra- 
matic, and it is only of the dramatic part that the multitude are cognizant.) 



THE IDEAL OF HUMANITY. 281 

But when this process has taken place, and the work haa 
become sanctified by time in the minds of men, it is impossible 

It is unnecessary, when, united with the higher qualities of a work, there are 
appeals to universal passion, to all the faculties and feelings which are 
general in man as an animal. The popularity is then as sudden as it ia 
wel! grounded, — it is hearty and honest in every mind, but it is based in 
every mind on a different species of excellence. Such will often be the 
case with the noblest works of literature. Take Don Quixote for ex- 
ample. The lowest mind would find in it perpetual and brutal amusement 
in the misfortunes of the knight, and perpetual pleasure in sympathy with 
tlio squire. A mind of average feeling would perceive the satirical meaning 
and force of the book, would appreciate its wit, its elegance, and its truth. 
But only elevated and peculiar minds discover, in addition to all this, the 
full moral beauty of the love and truth which are the constant associates 
of all that is even most weak and erring in the character of its hero, and 
pass over the rude adventure and scurrile jest in haste — perhaps in pain, to 
penetrate beneath the rusty corslet, and catch from the wandering glance, 
the evidence and expression of fortitude, self-devotion, and universal love. So 
again, with the works of Scott and Byron ; popularity was as instant as it was 
deserved, because there is in them an appeal to those passions which are 
universal in all men, as well as an expression of such thougiits as can be 
received only by the few. But they are admired by the majority of their 
advocates for the weakest parts of their works, as a popular preacher by the 
majority of his congregation for the worst part of his sermon. 

The process is rapid and certain, when, though there may be little to catch 
the multitude at once, there is much which they can enjoy when their atten- 
tion is authoritatively directed to it. So rests the reputation of Shakspeare. 
No ordinary mind can comprehend wherein his undisputed superiority consists, 
but there is yet quite as much to amuse, thrill, or excite, — quite as much of 
what is in the strict sense of tlie word, dramatic, in his works as in any one 
else's. They were received, therefore, when first written, with average ap- 
proval, as works of common merit : but when the high decision was made, 
and the circle spread, the public took up the hue and cry conscientiously 
enough. Let them have daggers, ghosts, clowns, and kings, and with such 
real and definite sources of enjoyment, they will take the additional trouble 
to learn half a dozen quotations, witliout understanding them, and admit the 
superiority of ?liakspeare without further demur. 



282 I'AINTIXG, 

that any new work of equal merit can be impartially compared ' 
with it, except by minds not only educated and generally 
capable of appreciating merit, but strong enough to shake 
off the weight of prejudice and association, which invariably 
incline them to the older favorite. 

There is sublimity and power in every field of nature from 
the pole to the Une ; and though the painters of one covmtry 
are often better and greater, universally, than those of another, 
this is less because the subjects of art are wanting anywhere, 
than because one country or one age breeds mighty and think- 
ing men, and another none. 

The world does, indeed, succeed — oftener than is, perhaps, 
altogether well for the world — in making Yes mean No, and 
No mean Yes. But the world has never succeeded, nor ever 
will, in making itself delight in black clouds more than in blue 
sky, or love the dark earth better than the rose that grows 
from it. Happily for mankind, beauty and ugliness are as 
positive in their nature as physical pain and pleasure, as light 
and darkness, or as life and death ; and, though they may be 
denied or misunderstood in many fantastic ways, the most 
sitbtle reasoner will at least find that color and sweetness are 
still attractive to him, and that no logic will enable him to 
think the rainbow sombre, or the violet scentless. But the 
theory that beauty was merely a result of custom was very 
common in Johnson's time. Goldsmith has, I think, expressed 
it with more force and wat than any other writer, in various 
passages of the Citizen of the "World. And it was, indeed, a 
curious retribution of the folly of the world of art, which for 
some three centuries had given itself recklessly to the pursuit 
of beauty, that at last it should be led to deny the very exist- 
ence of what it had so morbidly and passionately souglit. It 



THE IDEAL OF HUilAXITY. 



was as if a child should leave its home to pursue the rahiLow, 
and then, breathless and hopeless, declare that it did not exist, 
Nor is the lesson less useful which may be gained in observing 
the adoption of such a theory by Reynolds himself It shows 
how completely an artist may be unconscious of the principles 
of his own work, and how he may be led by mstinct to do all 
that is right, while he is misled by false logic to say all that is 
wrong. For nearly every word that Reynolds wrote was con- 
trary to his own practice ; he seems to have been born to 
teach all error by his precept, and all excellence by his exam- 
ple ; he enforced with his lij^s generalization and idealism, 
while with his pencil he was tracing the patterns of the dresses 
of the belles of his day ; he exhorted his pupils to attend only 
to the invariable, while he himself was occupied in distinguish- 
ing every variation of womanly temper ; and he denied the 
existence of the beautiful, at the same instant that he arrested 
it as it passed, and perpetuated it for ever. 

The knowing of rules and the exertion of judgment have a 
tendency to check and confuse the fancy in its flow ; so that it 
will follow, that, in exact proportion as a master knows anything 
about rules of right and wrong, he is Ukely to be uninventive; 
and in exact proportion as he holds higher rank and has nobler 
inventive power, he will know less of rules; not despising them, 
but simply feeling that between him and them there is nothing 
in common, — that dreams cannot be ruled — that as they come, 
so they must be caught, and they cannot be caught in any 
other shape than that they come in ; and that he might as well 
attempt to rule a rainbow into rectitude, or cut notches in a 
moth's Avings to hold it by, as in any Anse attempt to modify, 
by rule, the forms of the involuntary vision. 

And this, which by reason we have thus anticipated, is in 
reality universally so. There is no cxcejition. The great men 



284 PAINTING. 

never know how or why they do things. They have no rines, 
cannot comprehend the nature of rules ; — do not, usually, even 
know, m what they do, what is best or what is worst : to them 
it is all the same ; something they cannot help saying or doing, 
— one piece of it as good as another, and none of it (it seems 
to them) w'orth much. The moment any man begins to talk 
about rules, in whatsoever art, you may know him for a second- 
rate man ; and, if he talks about them much, he is a third-rate, 
or not an artist at all. To this rule there is no exception in any 
art ; but it is perhaps better to be illustrated in the art of 
music than in that of painting. I fell by chance the other day 
upon a work of De Stendhal's, "Vies de Haydn, de Mozart, et 
de Metastase," fuller of common sense than any book I ever 
read on the arts ; though I see, by the slight references made 
occasionally to painting, that the author's knowledge therein 
is Avarped and limited by the elements of general teaching in 
the schools around him ; and I have not yet, therefore, looked 
at what he has separately written on j^ainting. But one or 
two passages out of this book on music are closely to our 
jH-esent purpose. 

" Counterpoint is related to mathematics : a fool, with pa- 
tience, becomes a respectable savant in that ; but for the part 
of genius, melody, it has no rules. No art is so utterly deprived 
of precepts for the production of the beautiful. So much the 
better for it and for us. Cimarosa, when first at Prague his 
air was executed, Pria che spunti in ciel 1' Aurora, never heard 
the pedants say to him, 'Your air is fine, because you have 
followed such and such a rule established by Pergolese in such 
an one of his airs ; but it would be finer still if you had conformed 
yourself to such another rule from which Galluppi never 
deviated." 

Yes : " so much the better for it, and for us ;" but I trust 
the time will soon come when melody in painting will be 






THE IDEAL OF HUMANITY. 285 

understood, no less tlian in music, and when people will find 
that, there also, the great melodists have no rules, and cannot 
have any, and that there are in this, as in sound, "no precepts 
for the production of the beavitiful." 

Again. " Behold, my friend, an example of that simple 
way of answering which embarrasses much. One asked him 
(Haydn) the reason for a harmony — for a passage's bemg 
assigned to one instrument rather than another; but all he ever 
answered was, 'I have done it, because it does well.' " Farther 
on, De Stendhal relates an anecdote of Haydn ; I beUeve one 
well known, but so much to our jiurpose that I repeat it. 
Haydn had agreed to give some lessons in counterpoint to an 
English nobleman. " 'For our first lesson,' said the pupD, 
already learned in the art — drawing at the same time a quatuor of 
Haydn's from his pocket, — ' for our first lesson, may we examine 
this quatuor ; and -^-ill you tell me the reasons of certain 
modulations, which I cannot entirely aj^prove, because they 
are contrary to the principles?' Haydn, a little surprised, 
declared himself ready to answer. The nobleman began ; and 
at the very first measures found matter for objection. Haydn, 
xoho iiwented habitually^ and who was the contrary of a pedant, 
found himself much embarrassed, and answered always, 'I have 
done that because it has a good effect. I have put that passage 
there because it does well.' The Englishman, who judged that 
these answers proved nothing, recommenced his proofs, and 
demonstrated to him, by very good reasons, that this quatuor 
was good for nothing. ' But, my lord, arrange this quatuor 
then to your fancy, — play it so, and you will see which of the 
two ways is the best.' ' But why is yours the best which is 
contrary to the rules?' 'Because it is the pleasantest.' The 
nobleman replied. Haydn at last lost patience, and said, 'I see, 
my lord, it is you who have the goodness to give lessons to me, 
and trulv I am forced to confess to vou that I do not deserve 



286 PAINTING, 

the honor.' The partizan of the rules departed, still astonished 
that in following the rules to the letter one cannot infallibly 
produce a ' Matrimonio Segreto.' " 

This anecdote, whether in all points true or not, is in its ten- 
dency most instructive, except only in that it makes one false 
inference or admission, namely, that a good composition can 
be contrary to the rules. It may be contrary to certain prin- 
ciples, supposed in ignorance to be general ; but every great 
composition is in perfect harmony with all true rules, and 
involves thousands too delicate for ear, or eye, or thought, to 
trace ; still it is possible to reason, with infinite pleasure and 
profit, about these principles, when the thing is once done 5 
only, all our reasoning will not enable any one to do another 
thing like it, because all reasoning falls infinitely short of the 
divine instinct. Thus we may reason wisely over the way a 
bee builds its comb, and be profited by finding out certain 
things about the angles of it. But the bee knows nothing 
about those matters. It builds its comb in a far more inevita- 
ble way. And, from a bee to Paul Veronese, all master- work- 
ers work with this awful, this inspired unconsciousness. 

I said just now that there was no exception to this law, 
that the great men never knew how or why they did 
things. It is, of course, only with caution that such a broad 
statement should be made ; but I have seen much of diiFerent 
kinds of artists, and I have always found the knowledge of, 
and attention to, rules so accurately in the inverse ratio to the 
power of the painter, that I have myself no doubt that the law 
is constant, and that men's smallness may be trigonometrically 
estimated by the attention which, in their work, they pay to 
principles, especially principles of composition. The general 
way in which the great men speak is of " trying to do ". this 
or that, just as a child would tell of something he had seen 
and could not utter. 



THE IDEAL OF HUMANITY. 28*i 

And this is the reason for the somewhat singular, but very 
palpable truth that the Cliinese, and Indians, and other senii- 
civilized nations, can color better than we do, and that an 
Indian shawl or Chinese vase are still, in invention of color, 
inimitable by us. It is their glorious ignorance of all rules that 
does it ; the pure and true instincts have play, and do their 
work, — instincts so subtle, that the least warping or compres- 
sion breaks or blunts them ; and the moment we begin teach- 
ing people any rules about color, and make them do this or 
that, we crush the instinct generally for ever. Hence, hitherto, 
it has been an actual necessity, in order to obtain power of 
coloring, that a nation should be half savage : everybody could 
color in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; but we were ruled 
and legahzed into grey in the fifteenth ; — only a little salt sim- 
plicity of their sea natures at Venice still keeping their pre- 
cious, sheU-fishy purpleness and power ; and now that is gone ; 
and nobody can color anywhere, except the Hindoos and Chi- 
nese ; but that need not be so, and wUl not be so long ; for, in 
a little while, people will find out their mistake, and give up 
talking about rules of color, and then everybody will color 
again, as easily as they now talk. 

Such, then, being the generally passive or instinctive charac- 
ter of right invention, it may be asked how these unmanageable 
instincts are to be rendered practically serviceable in historical 
or poetical painting, — especially historical, in Avhich between 
men who, like Horace Vernet, David, or Domenico Tintoret, 
would employ themselves in painting, more or less graphically, 
the outward verities of passing events — battles, councils, &g. 
— of their day (who, supposing them to work worthily of their 
mission, would become, properly so called, historical or narra- 
tive painters) ; and men who sought, in scenes of perhaps less 
outward importance, " noble grounds for noble emotion ;" — 
who would be, in a certain separate sense, poetical painters ; 



288 PAINTING. 

some of them taking for subjects events which had actually 
happened, and others themes from the poets ; or, better still, 
becoming jjoets themselves in the entire sense, and mventing 
the story as they painted it. Painting seems to me only just 
to be beginning, in this sense also, to take its proper position 
beside literature. 

Finally, as far as I can observe, it is a constant law that the 
greatest men, whether poets or historians, live entirely in their 
own age, and that the greatest fruits of their work are gathered 
out of their own age, Dante paints Italy in the thirteenth 
century ; Chaucer, England in the fourteenth ; Masaccio, 
Florence in the fifteenth ; Tintoret, Venice in the sixteenth ; 
— all of them utterly regardless of anachronism and minor 
error of every kind, but getting always vital truth out of the 
vital present. 

If it be said that Shakspere wrote perfect historical plays on 
siibjects belonging to the preceding centuries, I answer, that 
they are perfect plays just because there is no care about cen- 
turies in them, but a life which all men recognise for the 
human life of all time ; and this it is, not because Shakspere 
sought to give universal truth, but because, painting honestly 
and completely from the men about him, he painted that human 
nature which is, indeed, constant enough, — a rogue in the 
fifteenth century being, at hearty what a rogue is in the nhie- 
teenth and was in the twelfth ; and an honest or a knightly 
man being, in like manner, very similar to other such at any 
otlier time. And the work of these great ideaUsts is, there- 
fore, always universal; not because it is not portrait^ but 
because it is complete portrait down to the heart, which is the 
same in all ages : and the work of the mean idealists is not uni- 
versal, not because it is portrait, but because it is A«?/' portrait, 
— of the outside, the manners and the dress, not of the heart. 
Thus Tintoret and Shakspere paint, both of them, simply 



THE IDEAL OF HUMANITY. 289 

Venetian and English nature as they saw it in their time, 
down to the root ; and it does for all time ; but as for any 
care to cast themselves into the particular ways and tones of 
thought, or custom, of past time in their historical work, you 
will find it in neither of them, nor in any other perfectly great 
man that I know of 

If there had been no vital truth in their present, it is hard 
to say what these men could have done, I suppose, primarily, 
they would not have existed ; that they, and the matter they 
have to treat of, are given together, and that the strength of 
the nation and its historians correlatively rise and fall — Hero- 
dotus springing out of the dust of Marathon. It is also hard 
to say how far our better general acquaintance with minor 
details of past history may make us able to turn the shadow 
on the imaginative dial backwards, and naturally to hve, and 
even live strongly if we choose, in past periods ; but this main 
truth will always be unshaken, that the only historical painting 
deserving the name i» portraiture of our own living men and 
our own passing times,* and that all efforts to summon up the 
events of bygone periods, though often useful and touching, 
must come under an inferior class of poetical painting ; nor 
will it, I believe, ever be much followed as their main work 
by the strongest men, but only by the weaker and compara- 
tively sentimental (rather than imaginative) groups. 

Suppose you have to teach two children drawing, one 
thoroughly clever aod active-minded, the other dull and slow ; 
and you put before them Jullien's chalk studies of heads — 
Etudes d deux crayons — and desire them to be copied. The dull 
child will slowly do your bidding, blacken his paper and rub it 
white again, and patiently and painfully, in the course of three 
or four years, attain to the performance of a chalk head, not 

* See Edinburgli Lectures, p. 217. 
13 



290 PAINTING, 

much worse than his original, but still of less value than the 
paper it is drawn upon. But the clever child will not, or will 
only by force, consent to this disciplme. He finds other means 
of expressing himself with his pencil somehow or another ; and 
presently you find his paper covered with sketches of his 
grandfather and grandmother, and uncles, and cousms, — 
sketches of the room, and the house, and the cat, and the dog, 
and the country outside, and everything in the world he can 
set his eyes on ; and he gets on, and even his child's w^ork has 
a value in it — a truth which makes it worth keeping ; no one 
knows how precious, perhaps, that portrait of his grandfath jr 
may be, if any one has but the sense to keep it till the tin/e 
when the old man can be seen no more up the lawn, nor by 
the wood. That child is working in the middle-age spirit — the 
other in the modern spirit. 

But there is something still more striking in the evils which 
have resulted fi-om the modern regardlcssness of truth. Con- 
sider, for instance, its effect on what is called historical painting. 
What do you at present mean by historical painting ? Now- 
a-days, it means the endeavoring, by the power of imagination, 
to portray some historical event of past days. But in the 
middle ages, it meant representing the acts of their own days ; 
and that is the only historical painting worth a straw. Of all 
the wastes of tune and sense which modernism has invented — 
and they are many — ^none are so ridiculous as this endeavor 
to represent past history. What do you suppose our descen- 
dants will care for our imaginations of the events of former 
days ? Suppose the Greeks, instead of representing their own 
Avarriors as they fought at Marathon, had left us nothing but 
"~\ their imaginations of Egyptian battles ; and suppose the Italians, 
in like manner, instead of portraits of Can Grande and Dante, 
or of Leo the Tenth and Raphael, had left us nothing but 
imaginary portraits of Pericles and Miltiades? What fools we 



HISTOKICAi PAINTING. 291 

should have thought them ! how bitterly we should have been 
provoked with their folly ! And that is precisely what our 
descendants will feel towards us, so far as our grand historical 
and classical schools are concerned. What do we care, they 
will say, what those 1 9th century people fancied about Greek 
and Roman history ! If they had left us a few plain and rational 
sculptures and pictures of their own battles, and their own 
men, in their everyday dress, we should have thanked them. 
Well, but, you will say, we have left them portraits of our 
great men, and paintings of our great battles. Yes, you have 
indeed, and that is the only historical painting that you either 
have or can have ; but you don't call that historical painting. 
You don't thank the men who do it ; you look do\^'n upon them 
and dissuade them from it, and tell them they don't belong to 
the grand schools. And yet they are the only true historical 
painters, and the only men who will produce any effect on 
their own generation, or any other. Wilkie was an historical 
painter, Chantrey an historical sculptor, because they painted, 
or carved, the veritable things and men they saw, not men 
and thmgs as they believed they might have been, or should 
have been. But no one tells si^ch men they are historical 
painters, and they are discontented with what they do; and 
poor Wilkie must needs travel to see the grand school, and 
imitate the grand school, and rum himself. And you have had 
multitudes of other painters ruined, from the beginning, by that 
grand school. There was Etty, naturally as good a painter as 
ever lived, but no one told him what to pauit, and he studied 
the antique, and the grand schools, and painted dances of 
nymphs in red and yellow shawls to the end of his days. Much 
good may they do you ! He is gone to the grave, a lost mind. 
There was Flaxman, another naturally great man, with as true 
an eye for nature as Raphael, — he stumbles over the blocks of 
the antique statues — wanders in the dark valley of their ruin? 



292 PAINTING. 

to the end of his days. He has left you a few outlines of mus- 
cular men sti'addling and frowning behind round shields. 
Much good may they do you ! Another lost mind. And of 
those who are lost namelessly, who have not strength enough 
even to make themselves known, the poor pale students who 
lie buried for ever in the abysses of the great schools, nc 
account can be rendered ; they are numberless. 

And the wonderful thing is, that of all these men whom you 
now have come to call the great masters, there Avas not one 
who confessedly did not paint his own present world, plainly 
and truly. Homer sang of what he saw ; Phidias carved what 
he saw ; Raphael painted the men of his own time in their own 
caps and mantles ; and every man who has ai'isen to eminence 
in modern times has done so altogether by his working in their 
way, and doing the things he saw. How did Reynolds rise ? 
Not by painting Greek women, but by painting the glorious 
Uttle living ladies this, and ladies that, of his own time. How 
did Hogarth rise ? Not by painting Athenian follies, but 
London follies. Who are the men who have made an impres- 
sion upon you yourselves, — upon your own age ? I suppose 
the most popular painter of the day is Landseer. Do you 
suppose he studied dogs and eagles out of the Elgin Marbles ? 
And yet in the very face of these plain, incontrovertible, all- 
visible facts, we go on from year to year with the base system 
of Academy teaching, in spite of which every one of these men 
has risen : I say in spite of the entire method and aim of our 
art-teaching. It destroys the greater number of its pupils 
altogether ; it hinders and paralyses the greatest. There is not 
a living painter whose eminence is not in spite of everything he 
has been taught from his youth upwards, and who, whatever 
his eminence may be, has not suffered much injury in the course 
of his victory. For observe : this love of what is called ideality 
or beauty in preference to truth, operates not only in making 



HISTORICAL PAINTING. 295 

US choose the past rather than the present for our subjects, hut 
it makes us falsify the present when we do take it for our 
subject. I said just now that portrait-painters were historical 
painters ; — so they are ; but not good ones, because not faithful 
ones. The beginning and end of modern portraiture is adulation. 
The painters cannot live but by flattery ; we should desert 
them if they spoke honestly. And therefore we can have no 
good portraiture ; for in the striving after that which is not in 
their model, they lose the inner and deeper nobleness which is 
in their model. I saw not long ago, for the first time, the 
portrait of a man whom I knew well, — a young man, but a 
rehgious man, — and one who had suffered much from sickness. 
The whole dignity of his features and person depended upon 
the expression of serene yet solemn purpose sustaining a feeble 
frame ; and the painter, by way of flattering him, strengthened 
him, and made him athletic in body, gay in countenance, idle 
in gesture ; and the whole power and being of the man himself 
were lost. And this is still more the case with our public 
portraits. You have a j^ortrait, for instance, of the Duke of 
"Wellington at the end of the North Bridge, — one of the 
thousand equestrian statues of Modernism, — studied from the 
show-riders of the amphitheatre, with their horses on their 
hind-legs in the saw-dust. Do you suppose that was the way 
the Duke sat when your destinies depended on him ? when the 
foam hung from the lij)s of his tired horse, and its wet limbs 
were dashed with the bloody slime of the battle-field, and he 
himself sat anxious in his quietness, grieved in his fearlessness, as 
he watched, scythe-stroke by scythe-stroke, the gathering in of 
the harvest of death ? You would have done something had 
you thus left his image in the enduring iron, but nothing 
now. 

But the time has at last come for all this to be put an end 
to ; and nothing can well be more extraordinary than the way 



294 PAINTING. 

in whicli the men have risen who are to do it. Pupils in the 
same schools, receiving precisely the same instruction which for 
so long a time has paralysed every one of our painters, — these 
boys agree in disliking to copy the antique statues set before 
them. They copy them as they are bid, and they copy them 
better than any one else, they carry off prize after prize, and 
yet they hate their work. At last they are admitted to study 
from the life ; they find the life very different fi-om the antique, 
and say so. Their teachers tell them the antique is the best, 
and they mustn't copy the life. They agree among themselves 
that they Uke the life, and that copy it they will. They do 
copy it faithfully, and their masters forthwith declare them to 
be lost men. Their fellow-students hiss them whenever they 
enter the room. They can't help it ; they join hands and tacitly 
resist both the hissing and the instruction. Accidentally, a 
few prints of the works of Giotto, a few casts from those of 
Ghiberti, fall into their hands, and they see in these something 
they never saw before — something intensely and everlastmgly 
true. They examine farther into the matter ; they discover foi 
themselves the greater part of what I have laid before you to- 
night ; they form themselves into a body, and enter upon that 
crusade which has hitherto been victorious. And which will 
be absolutely and triumphantly victorious. The great mistake 
which has hitherto prevented the public mind from fully going 
with them must soon be corrected. That mistake was the 
supposition that, instead of mshing to recur to the principles 
of the early ages, these men wished to bring back the ignorance 
of the early ages. This notion, grounded first on some hardness 
in then* earlier works, which resulted — as it must always result 
• — from the do^\Tiright and earnest effort to jiaint nature as in 
a looking-glass, was fostered partly by the jealousy of their 
beaten competitors, and partly by the pure, perverse, and 
hopeless ignorance of the whole body of art-critics, so called, 



SCHOOL DEC0EA.TION, 295 

connected with the press. No notion was ever more baseless 
or more ridiculous. 

The first and most important kind of public buildings which 
we are always sure to want, are schools : and I would ask you 
to consider very carefully, whether we may not wisely introduce 
some great changes in the way of school decoration. Hitherto, 
as fiir as I know, it has either been so difficult to give all the 
education we wanted to our lads, that we have been obliged to 
do it, if at all, with cheap furniture in bare walls ; or else we 
have considered that cheap furniture and bare walls are a 
proper part of the means of education ; and supposed that boys 
learned best when they sat on hard forms, and had nothing but 
blank plaster about and above them whereupon to employ their 
spare attendon; also, that it was as well they should be 
accustomed to rough and ugly conditions of things, partly by 
way of preparing them for the hardships of life, and partly 
tliat there might be the least possible damage done to floors 
and fonns, in the event of their becoming, during the master's 
absence, the fields or instruments of battle. All this is so fai- 
well and necessaiy, as it relates to the training of country lads, 
and the first training of boys in general. But there certainly 
comes a period in the life of a well educated youth, in which 
one of the principal elements of his education is, or ought to 
be, to give him refinement of habits ; and not only to teach him 
the strong exercises of which liis frame is capable, but also to 
increase his bodily sensibility and refinement, and show him 
such small matters as the way of handling things properly, 
and treating them considerately. Not only so, but I believe 
the notion of fixing the attention by keeping the room empty, 
is a w^holly mistaken one: I think it is just in the emptiest 
room that the mind wanders most ; for it gets restless, like a 
bird, for Avant of a perch, and casts about for any possible 



296 PAINTI>fG. 

means of getting out and away. And even if it be fixed, by an 
effort, on the business in hand, that business becomes itself 
repulsive, more than it need be, by the vileness of its associa- 
tions ; and many a study appears dull or painful to a boy, when 
it is pursued on a blotted deal desk, under a wall with nothing 
on it but scratches and pegs, which would have been pursued 
l^leasantly enough in a curtained corner of his father's library, 
or at the lattice window of his cottage. Nay, my own belief 
is, that the best study of all is the most beautiful ; and that a 
quiet glade of forest, or the nook of a lake shore, are worth all 
the schoolrooms in Christendom, when once you are past the 
multiplication table ; but be that as it may, there is no question 
at all but that a time ought to come in the life of a well 
trained youth, when he can sit at a writing table without 
wanting to throw the inkstand at his neighbor ; and when 
also he will feel more capable of certain efforts of mind with 
beautiful and refined forms about him than with ugly ones. 
When that time comes he ought to be advanced into the 
decorated schools ; and this advance ought to be one of the 
important and honorable epochs of his life. 

I have not time, however, to insist on the mere serviceableness 
to our youth of refined architectural decoration, as such ; for I 
want you to consider the probable influence of the particular 
kind of decoration which I wish you to get for them, namely, 
historical painting. You know we have hitherto been in the 
habit of conveying all our historical knowledge, such as it is, 
by the ear only, never by the eye ; all our notions of things 
being ostensibly derived from verbal description, not from sight. 
Now, I have no doubt that, as we grow gradually wiser — and 
we are doing so every day — we shall discover at last that the 
eye is a nobler organ than the ear ; and that through the eye 
we must, in reality, obtain, or put into form, nearly all the 
useful information we are to have about this world. Even as 



SCHOOL DECOKATIOX. 29V 

the matter stands, you will find that the knowledge which a 
boy is supposed to receive from verbal description is only 
available to him so far as in any underhand Avay he gets a 
sight of the thing you are talkmg about. I remember well 
that, for many years of my life, the only notion I had of the look 
of a Greek knight was complicated between recollection of a 
small engravmg in my pocket Pope's Homer, and reverent 
study of the Horse-Guards. And though I believe that most 
boys collect their ideas from more varied sources, and ai-range 
them more carefully than I did ; still, whatever sources they 
seek must always be ocular : if they are clever boys, they will 
go and look at the Greek vases and sculptures in the British 
Museum, and at the weapons in our armories — they will see 
what real armor is like in lustre, and what Greek armor was 
like in form, and so put a fairly true image together, but stiU 
not, in ordinary cases, a very Hving or interesting one. Now, 
the use of yoiir decorative painting would be, in myriads of 
ways, to animate their history for them, and to put the living 
aspect of i^ast things before their eyes as faithfully as intelligent 
invention can ; so that the master shall have nothing to do but 
once to pomt to the schooh'oom walls, and for ever afterwards 
the meaning of any word would be fixed in a boy's mmd in the 
best possible way. Is it a question of classical dress — what a 
tunic was like, or a chlamys, or a peplus ? At this day, you 
have to point to some vile woodcut, in the middle of a 
dictionary page, representing the tiling hung upon a stick; 
but then, you would point to a hundred figures, wearing the 
actual dress, in its fiery colors, in all the actions of various 
stateliness or strength ; you would understand at once how it 
fell round the people's hmbs as they stood, how it drifted from 
their shoulders as they went, how it veiled their faces as they 
wept, how it covered their heads in the day of battle. JVbw, if 
you want to see what a weapon is like, you refer, in like manner, 

13* 



298 PAINTING. 

to a numbered page, in which there are sj^earheads in rows, 
and sword-hilts in symmetrical groups; and gradually the boy 
gets a dim mathematical notion how one scymitar is hooked to 
the right and another to the left, and one javelin has a knob to 
it and another none : while one glance at your good picture 
would show him, — and the first rainy afternoon in the school 
room would for ever fix in his mind, — the look of the sword 
and spear as they fell or flew ; and how they pierced, or bent, 
or shattered — how men wielded them, and how men died by 
them. But far more than all this, is it a question not of 
clothes or weapons, but of men? how can we sufliiciently 
estimate the effect on the mind of a noble youth, at the time 
when the world opens to him, of having faithful and touching 
representations put before him of the acts and j^resences of 
great men — how many a resolution, which Avould alter and 
exalt the whole course of his after-life, might be formed, when 
in some dreamy twilight he met, through his own tears, the 
fixed eyes of those shadows of the great dead, unescapable and 
calm, piercing to his soul ; or fancied that their lips moved in 
dread reproof or soundless exhortation. And if but for one 
out of many this were true — if yet, in a few, you could be 
sure that such influence had indeed changed their thoughts 
and destinies, and turned the eager and reckless youth, who 
would have cast away his energies on the race-horse or the 
gambling-table, to that noble life-race, that holy life-hazard, 
Avhich should win all glory to himself and all good to his country 
— would not that, to some purpose, be "political economy ^ 
of art?" 

And observe, there could be no monotony, no exhaustibleness, 
in the scenes required to be thus portrayed. Even if there were, 
and you ^\'antcd for every school in the kingdom, one death of 
Leonidns ; one battle of Marathon ; one death of Cleobis and 
Bito ; there need not therefore be more monotony in your art 



SCHOOL DECORATION. 299 

than there was in the repetition of a given cycle of subjects by 
the religious j^auiters of Italy. But we ought not to admit a 
cycle at all. For though we had as many great schools as wt 
have great cities (one day I hope we shall have), centuiies of 
painting would not exhaust, m all the number of them, the 
noble and pathetic subjects which might be chosen from the 
history of even one noble nation. But, besides this, you will 
not, in a little while, limit your youths' studies to so narrow 
fields as you do now. There will come a time — I am sure of it 
— when it will be found that the same practical results, both in 
mental discipline, and in j)olitical pliilosophy, are to be attained 
by the accurate study of mediaeval and modern as of ancient 
history ; and that the facts of mediaeval and modern history 
are, on the whole, the most important to us. And among 
these noble groups of constellated schools which I foresee 
arising in our England, I foresee also that there will be divided 
fields of thought ; and that while each Avill give its scholars a 
great general idea of the world's history, such as all men should 
possess — each will also take upon itself, as its own special duty, 
the closer study of the course of events in some given place or 
time. It Avill review the rest of history, but it will exhaust its 
own special field of it ; and found its moral and jjolitical teaching 
on the most perfect jjossible analysis of the results of human 
conduct in one place, and at one epoch. And then, the galleries 
of that school will be painted with the historical scenes 
belonging to the ago which it has chosen for its special study. 

The fact is, that the greater number of persons or societies 
throughout Europe, Avhom wealth, or chance, or inheritance 
has put in the possession of valuable pictures, do not know a 
good picture from a bad one, and have no idea in what the 
value of a picture really consists. The reputation of certain 
worlcs i.^ raised, partly by accident, partly by the just tcstl 



300 PAINTING. 

mojiy of artists, partly and generally by the bad tastes of tlie 
public (no picture that I know of, has ever, in modern times, 
attained popularity, in the full sense of the term, without 
having some exceedingly bad qualities mingled with its good 
ones), and when this reputation has once been completely 
established, it little matters to what state the picture may be 
reduced : few minds are so completely devoid of iniagination 
as to be unable to invest it with the beauties which they have 
heard attributed to it. 

This being so, the pictures that are most valued are for the 
most part those by masters of established renown, which are 
highly or neatly finished, and of a size small enough to admit 
of their being placed in galleries or saloons, so as to be made 
subjects of ostentation, and to be easily seen by a crowd. For 
the support of the fame and value of such pictures, little more 
is necessary than that they should be kept bright, partly by 
cleaning, which is incipient destruction, and partly by what is 
called " restoring," that is, painting over, which is of course 
total destruction, Nearly all the gallery pictures in modern 
Europe have been more or less destroyed by one or the 
other of these operations, generally exactly in proportion to 
the estunation in which they are held ; and as, originally, the 
smaller and more highly finished works of any great master 
are usually his worst, the contents of many of our most cele- 
brated galleries are by this time, in reality, of very small 
value indeed. 

On the other hand, the most precious works of any noble 
painter are usually those which have been done quickly, and in 
the heat of the first thought, on a large scale, for places where 
there was little likelihood of their being well seen, or for 
patrons from whom there was little prospect of rich remunera- 
tion. In general, the best things are done in this way, or else 
in the enthusiasm and pride of accomplishing some great pur- 



NEGLECT OF WORKS OF ART. 301 

pose, such as painting a Cathedral or a Carapo-Santo from one 
end to the other, especially when the time has been short, and 
circumstances disadvantageous. Works thus executed are 
of course despised on account of their quantity, as well as 
their frequent slightness, in the places where they exist ; and 
they are too large to be portable, and too vast and compre- 
hensive to be read on the spot, in the hasty temper of the 
present age. They are, therefore, almost universally neglected, 
whitewashed by custodes, shot at by soldiers, suffered to drop 
from the walls piecemeal into powder and rags by society in 
general ; but, Avhich is an advantage more than counterbalanc- 
ing all this evil, they are not often "restored." What is left of 
them, however fragmentary, however ruuious, however ob- 
scured and defiled, is almost always the real thing / there are 
no fresh readings : and therefore the greatest treasures of art 
which Europe at this moment possesses are pieces of old plaster 
on ruinous brick walls, where the lizards burrow and bask, and 
which few other living creatures ever approach ; and torn sheets 
of dim canvass, in waste corners of churches ; and mildewed 
stains, in the shape of human figures, on the waUs of dark cham- 
bers, which now and then an exploring traveller causes to be 
unlocked by their tottering custode, looks hastily round, and 
retreats from in a weary satisfaction at his accomplished duty. 
Many of the pictures on the ceilings and walls of the Ducal 
Palace, by Paul Veronese and Tintoret, have been more or 
less reduced, by neglect, to this condition. Unfortunately 
they are not altogether without reputation, and their state 
has drawn the attention of the Venetian authorities and acade- 
micians. It constantly happens, that public bodies Avho will not 
pay five pounds to preserve a picture, will pay fifty to repaint 
it: and when I was at Venice in 1846, there were tAvo reme- 
dial operations carrying on at one and the same time, in the 
two buildings which contain the pictures of greatest value in 



302 PAINTING. 

the city (as pieces of color, of greatest value in the world), 
curiously illustrative of this peculiarity in human nature. 
Buckets were set on the floor of the Scuola di San Rocco, in 
every shower, to catch the rain which came through the pic 
tures of Tintoret on the ceiling ; while in the Ducal Palace, 
those of Paul Veronese were themselves laid on the floor to 
be repainted ; and I was myself present at the re-illumination 
of the breast of a white horse, with a brush, at the end of a 
stick five feet long, luxuriously dipped m a common house 
painters' vessel of paint. 

There are, indeed, some kinds of knowledge with which an 
artist ought to be thoroughly furnished ; those, for instance, 
which enable him to express himself: for this knowledge 
relieves instead of encumbering his mind, and permits it to 
attend to its purposes instead of wearying itself about means. 
The whole mystery of manipulation and manufacture should 
be familiar to the painter from a child. He should know the 
chemistry of all colors and materials whatsoever, and should 
prepare all his colors himself, in a little laboratory of his own. 
Limiting his chemistry to this one subject, the amount of 
practical science necessary for it, and such accidental dis- 
coveries as might fall in his Avay m the course of his work, 
of better colors or better modes of preparing them, would be 
an infinite refreshment to his mind ; a minor subject of 
interest to which it might turn when jaded with comfortless 
labor, or exhausted with feverish invention, and yet which 
would never interfere with its higher functions, when it chose 
to address itself to them. Even a considerable amount of 
manual labor, sturdy color-grinding, and canvass-stretching, 
Avould be advantageous ; though this kind of work ought to be 
iu great part done by pupils. For it is one of the conditions 
of perfect knowledge in these matters, that every great master 



PAINTING. 303 

should have a certain number of pupils, to whom he is to 
impart all the knowledge of materials and means which he him- 
self possesses, as soon as possible ; so that, at any rate, by the 
time they are fifteen years old, they may know all that he 
knows himself in tliis kind ; that is to say, all that the world 
of artists know, and his 0"\\ti discoveries besides, and so never 
be troubled about methods any mof §. Not that the knowledge 
even of his own particular methods is to be of purpose confined 
to himself and his pupils, but that necessarily it must be so in 
some degree ; for only those who see him at work daily can 
understand his small and multitudinous ways of practice. 
These cannot verbally be explained to everybody, nor is it 
needful that they should, only let them be concealed from no- 
body Avho cai'es to see them ; in which case, of course, his 
attendant scholars will know them best. 

The ait of the thirteenth century is the foundation of all 
art, — nor merely the foundation, but the root of it ; that is to 
say, succeeding art is not merely built upon it, but was all 
comprehended in it, and is developed out of it. Passing this 
great century, we find three successive branches developed 
from it, in each of the three following centuries. The four- 
teenth centur)' is pre-eminently the age of Thought,ihe fifteenth 
the age of Drawinff, and the sixteenth the age of Painting. 

Observe, first, the fourteenth century is pre-eminently the 
age of thought. It begins with the first words of the poem 
of Dante ; — and all the great pictorial poems — the mighty 
series of works in which everything is done to relate, but 
nothing to imitate — belong to this century. I should only 
confuse you by giving you the names of marvellous artists, 
most of them little familiar to British ears, who adorned this 
century in Italy ; but you will easily remember it as the age 
of Dante and Giotto — the age of Thonaht. 



304 PAINTING. 

The men of the succeeding century (the fifteenth), felt that 
they could not rival their j^redecessors in invention, but might 
excel them in execution. Oi'iginal thoughts belonging to this 
century are comparatively rare ; even Raphael and Michael 
Angelo themselves borrowed all their principal ideas and 
plans of pictures from their predecessors ; but they executed 
them with a precision up to that time unseen. You must under- 
stand by the word " drawing," the perfect rendering of forms, 
whether in sculpture" or painting ; and then remember the 
fifteenth century as the age of Leonardo, Michael Angelo, 
Lorenzo Ghiberti, and Raphael, — pre-eminently the age of 
Drawing. 

The sixteenth century produced the four greatest Painters^ 
that is to say, managers of color, that the world has seen ; 
namely, Tintoret, Paul Veronese, Titian, and Correggio. I 
need not say more to justify my calling it the age of Painting. 



t3ttvt 6. 
POETRY 



"Poetry is the expression of the beautiful — bywords — the beautiful of the 
outer and the inner world ; whatever is delectable to the eye or the ear, 
the every sense of the body and of the soul — it presides over veras dulcedines 
rerurn. It implies at once a vision and a faculty, a gift and an art. A 
thought may be poetical, and yet not poetry ; it may be a solution containing 
the poetical element, but waiting and wanting tlie precipitation of it, the 
crystallization of it." — North British Review. 



|3art e. 

POETRY. 

I AM writing at a window which commands a view of the 
head of the Lake of Geneva ; and as I look up from my paper, 
I see, beyond it, a blue breadth of softly moving water, and 
the outline of the mountains above Chillon, bathed in morn- 
ing mist. The first verses which naturally come into my 
mind are — 

" A thousand feet in depth below 
The massy waters meet and flow ; 
So far the fathom line was sent 
From Chillon's snow-white battlement." 

Let us see in what manner this poetical statement is distin- 
guished from a historical one. 

It is distinguished from a truly historical statement, first, in 
being simply false. The water under the castle of Chillon is 
not a thousand feet deep, nor anything like it.* Herein, cer- 
tainly, these lines fulfil Reynolds's first requii'ement in poetry, 
"that it should be inattentive to literal truth and minute 
exactness in detail." In order, however, to make our com- 
parison more closely in other points, let us assume that what 

* "MM. Mallet et Pietet, se trouvant sur le lac aupr^s du chateau de 
Chillon, le 6 Aoftt, 1774, plongerent a la profondeur de 312 pieds de un 
thermometre," &c. — Saussure, Voyages dans les Alpes, chap. ii. § 33. It 
appears from the next paragraph, that the thermometer was "au fond du lac." 



308 POETRY. 

is stated is indeed a fact, and that it was to be recorded, first 
historically, and then poetically. 

Historically stating it, then, we should say : " The lake was 
sounded from the walls of the castle of Chillon, and found to 
be a thousand feet deep." 

Now, if Reynolds be right in his idea of the difference 
between history and poetry, we shall find that Byron leaves out 
of this statement certain unnecessary details, and retains only 
the invariable, — that is to say, the points which the Lake of 
Geneva and castle of Chillon have in common with all other 
lakes and castles. 

Let us hear, therefore. 

" A thousand feet in depth below." 

" Below ?" Here is, at all events, a word added (instead 
of anything being taken away) ; mvariable, certainly in the 
case of lakes, but not absolutely necessary. 

'■ The massy waters meet and flow." 

" Massy !" why massy? Because deep water is heavy. The 
word is a good word, but it is assuredly an added detail, and 
expresses a character, not which the Lake of Geneva has in 
common with all other lakes, but which it has in distinction 
from those which are narrow or shallow. 

" Meet and flow." Why meet and flow ? Partly to make 
up a rhyme ; partly to tell us that the waters are forceful as 
well as massy, and changeful as well as deep. Observe, a 
farther addition of details, and of details more or less peculiar 
to the spot, or, according to Reynolds's definition, of " heavy 
matter, retarding the progress of the imagination." 

" So far the fathom line was sent." 
Why fathom line ? All lines for sounding are not fathom 



POETRY. 309 

lines. If the lake was evei- sounded from Chilon, it was 
probably sounded in metres, not fathoms. This is an addition 
of another particular detail, in which the only compliance 
with Reynolds's requirement is, that there is some chance of 
Its being an inaccurate one. 

" From Cliillon's snow-white battlement." 

"Why snow-white? Because castle battlements are not 
usually snow-white. This is another added detail, and a 
detail quite pecuUar to ChUlon, and therefore exactly the most 
striking word in the whole passage. 

"Battlement!" why battlement? Because all walls have 
not battlements, and the addition of the term marks the castle 
to be not merely a pi'ison, but a fortress. 

This is a curious result. Instead of finding, as we expected, 
the poetry distinguished from the history by the omission of 
details, we find it consist entirely in the addition of details ; 
and instead of being characterized by regard only of the inva- 
riable, we find its whole power to consist in the clear expres- 
sion of what is singular and particular ! 

The reader may pursue the investigation for himself in 
other instances. He will find in every case that a poetical is 
distinguished from a merely historical statement, not by being 
more vague, but more specific, and it might, therefore, at 
first appear that our author's comparison should be simply 
reversed, and that the Dutch School should be called poetical, 
and the Italian historical. But the term poetical does not 
appear very applicable to the generality of Dutch painting ; 
and a little reflection will show us, that if the Italians repre« 
sent only the invariable, they cannot be properly compared 
even to historians. For that which is incapable of change has 
no history, and records which state only the invariable need 
not b:" written, and could not be read. 



a 10 POETRY. 

It is evident, therefore, that our aixthor has entangled 
himself in some grave fallacy, by introducing this idea of in va- 
riableness as forming a distinction between poetical and his- 
torical art. We must not go on with our inquiry until we 
have settled satisfactorily the question already suggested to 
us, in what the essence of poetical treatment really consists. 
For though, as we have seen, it -certainly involves the addi- 
tion of specific details, it cannot be simply that addition which 
turns the history into poetry. For it is perfectly possible to 
add any number of details to a historical statement, and to 
make it more prosaic with every added word. As, for 
instance, " The lake was sounded out of a flat-bottomed boat, 
near the crab tree at the corner of the kitchen-garden, and 
was found to be a thousand feet nine inches deep, with a 
muddy bottom." It thus appeal's that it is not the multipli- 
cation of details which constitutes poetry ; nor their subtrac- 
tion which constitutes history; but that there must be 
something either in the nature of the details themselves, or 
the method of using them, which invests them with poetical 
power or historical propriety. 

It seems to me, and may seem to the reader, strange that 
we should need to ask the question, "What is poetry?" 
Here is a word we have been using all our lives, and, I sup- 
pose, with a very distinct idea attached to it ; and when I am 
now called upon to give a definition of this idea, I find myself 
at a pause. What is more singular, I do not at j^resent recol- 
lect hearing the question often asked, though surely it is a 
very natural one ; and I never recollect hearing it answered, 
or even attempted to be answered. In general, people shelter 
themselves under metaphors, and while Ave hear poetry 
described as an utterance of the soul, an effiision of Divinity., 
or voice of nature, or in other terms equally elevated and 
obscure, we never attain anything like a definite explana- 



POETKT. 311 

tion of the character which actually distinguishes it from 
prose. 

I come, after some embarrassment, to the conclusion, that 
poetry is "the suggestion, by the imagination, of noble 
grounds for the noble emotions." I mean, by the noble emo- 
tions, those four principal secret passions — Love, Veneration, 
Admiration, and Joy (this latter especially, if unselfish) ; and 
their opposites — Hatred, Indignation (or Scorn), Horror, and 
Grief, — this last, when unselfish, becoming Compassion. These 
passions in their various combinations constitute what is called 
" poetical feeling," when they are felt on noble grounds, that 
is, on great and true grounds. Indignation, for instance, is a 
poetical feeling, if excited by serious injury ; but it is not a 
poetical feeling if entertained on being cheated out of a small 
sum of money. It is very possible the manner of the cheat 
may have been such as to justify considerable indignation ; 
but the feeling is nevertheless not poetical, unless the grounds 
of it be large as well as just. In like manner, energetic admi- 
ration may be excited in certain minds by a display of fire- 
works, or a street of handsome shops ; but the feeling is not 
poetical, because the grounds of it are false, and therefore 
ignoble. There is in reality nothing to desei"ve admiration 
either in the firing of packets of gunpowder, or in the display 
of the stocks of warehouses. But admiration excited by the 
budding of a flower is a poetical feeUng, because it is impossi- 
ble that this manifestation of sjMritual power and vital beauty 
can ever be enough admired. 

Farther, it is necessary to the existence of poetry that the 
grounds of these feelings should he furnished by the imagina- 
tion. Poetical feeling, that is to say, mere noble emotion, is 
not poetry. It is happily inherent in all human nature deserv- 
ing the name, and is foun^ often to be purest in the least 
pophisticated. But the powei* of assembling, by the help of 



312 POETRY. 

the imagination, such images as will excite these feeUugs, ia 
the powei- of the poet or literally of the " Maker."* 

* Take, for instance, the beautiful stanza in the " Affliction of Margaret " 

" I look for ghosts, but none will force 
Their way to me. 'Tis falsely said 
That ever there was intercourse 
Between the living and the dead ; 

For, surely then, I should have sight 
Of him I wait for^ day and night. 
With love and longing infinite." 

This we call Poetry, because it is mvented or made by the writer, entering 
(nto the mmd of a supposed person. Next, take an instance of the actual 
feeUng truly experienced and simply expressed by a real person. 

" Nothing surprised me more than a woman of Argentiere, whose cottage 
I went into to ask for milk, as I came down from the glacier of Argentiere, iu- 
the month of March, 1764. An epidemic dysentery had prevailed in the 
village, and, a few months before, had taken away from her her father, her 
husband, and her brothers, so that she was left alone, with three children in 
the cradle. Her face had something noble in it, and its expression bore the 
seal of a calm and profound sorrow. After having given me milk, she asked 
me whence I came, and what I came there to do, so early in the year. "When 
she knew that I was of Geneva, she said to me, ' she could not believe that 
all Protestants were lost souls ; that there were many honest people among 
us, and that God was too good and too great to condemn all without distinc- 
tion.' Then, after a moment of reflection, she added, in shaking her head, 
' But, that which is very strange, is that of so many who have gone away, 
none have ever returned. I,' she added, with an expression of grief^ ' who 
have so mourned my husband and my brothers, who have never ceased to 
think of them, who every night conjure them with beseechings to tell me 
where they are, and in what state they are ! Ah, surely, if they lived any- 
where, they would not leave me thus ! But, perhaps,' she added, ' I am not 
worthy of this kindness; perhaps the pure and innocent spirits of these child- 
ren,' and she looked at the cradle, 'may have their presence, and the joy 
which is denied to me.' " — Saussure, Voyages dans les Alpes, chap. xxiv. 

This we do not call Poetry, merely because it is not invented, but the true 
■ittcraii(!e of a real person. 



POETRY. 313 

"Now this power of exciting the emotions depends, of course, 
on the richness of the imagination, and on its choice of those 
images which, in combination, will be most effective, or, for 
the particular work to be done, most fit. And it is altogether 
mipossible for a writer not endowed with invention to conceive 
what tools a true poet will make use of, or in what way he 
will apply them, or what unexpected results he Avill bring out 
by them ; so that it is vain to say that the details of poetry 
ought to jDOSsess, or ever do possess, any deji?iite character. 
Generally speaking, poetry runs into finer and more delicate 
details than jDrose ; but the details are not poetical because they 
are more delicate, but because they are employed so as to bring 
out an affectmg result. For instance, no one but a true poet 
would have thought of exciting our pity for a bereaved father 
by describing his way of locking the door of his house : 

" Perhaps to himselfj at that moment he said, 
The key I must take, for my Ellen is dead ; 
But of this in my ears not a word did he speak, 
And he went to the chase with a tear on his cheek." 

In like manner, in painting, it is altogether impossible to 
say beforehand what details a great painter may make poeti- 
cal by his use of them to excite noble emotions : and we shall, 
therefore, find presently that a i^ainting is to be classed in the 
great or inferior schools, not according to the kind of details 
which it represents, but according to the uses for which it 
employs them. 

It is only farther to be noticed, that infinite confusion has 
been introduced into this subject by the careless and illogical 
custom of opposing painting to poetry, instead of regarding 
poetry as consisting in a noble use, whether of colors or words. 
Painting is properly to be opposed to spealcing or writing^ but 
not \G poetry. Both painting and speaking are methods of 

14 



314 POETET. 

expression. Poetry is the employment of either for the 
noblest purposes. 

The imagination has three totally distinct functions. It 
combines, and by combination creates new forms ; but the 
secret principle of this combination has not been shown by the 
analysts. Again, it treats, or regards, both the simple images 
and its own combinations in peculiar ways ; and thirdly, it 
penetrates, analyzes, and reaches truths by no other faculty 
discoverable. 

The essential characters of composition, properly so called, 
are these. The mind which desires the new feature summoi is 
up before it those images wliich it supposes to be of the kind 
wanted, of these it takes the one which it supposes to be fittest, 
and tries it : if it will not answer, it tries another, until it has 
obtained such an association as pleases it. 

In this operation, if it be of little sensibility, it regards only 
the absolute beauty or value of the images brought before it ; 
and takes that or those which it thinks fairest or most interest- 
ing, without any regard to their sympathy with those for whose 
company they are destined. 

In composition the mind can only take cognizance of likeness 
or dissimilarity, or of abstract beauty among the ideas it brings 
together. But neither likeness nor dissimilarity secures har- 
mony. We saw in the chapter on unity that likeness destroyed 
harmony or unity of membership, and that difference did not 
necessarily secure it, but only that particular imperfection in 
each of the harmonizing parts which can only be supplied by 
its fellow part. If, therefore, the combination made is to be 
harmonious, the artist must induce in each of its component 
parts (suppose two only, for simplicity's sake,) such imperfection 
as that the other shall put it right. If one of them be perfect 
by itself, the other will be an excrescence. Both must be 
faulty when separate, and each corrected by the presence of 



POETRY. 315 

tlie other. If he can accomplish this, the result will be beautiful ; 
it will be a whole, an organized body with dependent members ; 
— he is an inventor. If not, let his sejjarate features be as 
beautiful, as apposite, or as resemblant as they may, they form 
no whole. They are two members glued together. 

A powerfully imagmative mind seizes and combines at the 
same instant, not only two, but all the important ideas of its 
l^oem or picture, and while it works with any one of them, it is at 
the same instant working with and modifying all in their rela- 
tions to it, never losing sight of their bearmgs on each other ; 
as. the motion of a snake's body goes through all pai'ts at once, 
and its volition acts at the same instant in coils that go contrary 
ways. 

This faculty is indeed something that looks as if man were 
made after the image of God. It is inconceivable, admirable, 
altogther divine. 

There is however, a limit to the power of all human imagin- 
ation. When the relations to be observed are absolutely 
necessary, and highly complicated, the mind cannot grasj) them, 
and the esult is a total deprivation of all power of imagination 
associative in such matter. For this reason, no human mind 
Mas ever conceived a new animal. 

We have thus far been defining that combining operation of 
the imagination which appears to be in a sort mechanical ; we 
must now examine its dealings with its separate conceptions. 

Its function and giil are the getting at the root, its nature 
and dignity depend on its holding things always by the heart. 
Take its hand from off the beating of that, audit will prophesy 
no longer ; it looks not in the eyes, it judges not by the voice, 
it describes not by outward features, all that it afiirms, judges, 
or describes, it affirms from within. 

It drinks the very vital sap of that it deals with : once there 
it is at liberty to throw up what new shoots it will, so always 



316 POETRY. 

that the true juice and sap be in them, and to prune and twist 
them at its pleasure, and bring them to fairer fruit than gre^ 
on tlie old tree. 

It may seem to the reader that I am incorrect m calling this 
penetrating, possession-takmg faculty, imagination. Be it so, 
the name is of little consequence ; the faculty itself, called by 
what name we will, I insist upon as the highest intellectual 
.-power of man. There is no reasoning in it, it works not by 
algebra, nor by integral calculus, it is a piercing, Pholas-like 
mind's tongue that works and tastes into the very rock heart, 
no matter what be the subject submitted to it, substance ©r 
spirit, all is alike, divided asunder, joint and marrow, whatever 
utmost truth, life, principle, it has, laid bare, and that which has 
no truth, life, nor principle, dissipated into its original smoke at 
a touch. The whisj^ei's at men's ears it lifts into visible angels. 
Vials that have lain sealed in the deep sea a thousand years it 
imseals, and brings out of them Genii. 

■ Every great concej^tion of jioct or painter is held and treated 
by this faculty. Every character that is so much as touched by 
men like ^schylus, Homer, Dante, or Shakspeare, is by them 
held by the heart ; and every circumstance or sentence of their 
being, speaking, or seeming, is seized by j^rocess from within, 
and is referred to that inner secret spring of which the hold is 
never lost for an instant ; so that every sentence, as it has been 
thought out fi'om the heart, opens for us a way down to the 
heart, leads us to the centre, and then leaves us to gather 
what more we may ; it is the open sesame of a huge, obscure, 
endless cave, Avith inexhaustible treasure of pure gold scattered 
in it ; the wandering about and gathering the pieces may be left 
to any of us, all can accomplish that ; but the first oi^ening of 
that invisible door in the rock is of the imagination only. 

I believe it will be found that the entirely unimaginative 
mind sees nothing of the object it has to dwell upon or describe, 



POETKY. 31^ 

and is therefore utterly unable, as it is blind itself, to set -any- 
thing before the eyes of the reader. 

/ The fancy sees the outside, and is able to give a portrait of 
the outside, clear, brilUant, and full of detail. 

, The imagination sees the heart and inner nature, and makes 
/ ■ . . 

/ them felt, but is often obscure, mysterious, and interrupted, m 

its giving of outer detail. 

Take an instance. A writer with neither imagination nor 

fancy, describing a fair Up, does not see it, but thinks about it, 

and about what is said of it, and calls it well-turned, or rosy, 

or dehcate, or lovely, or aflBicts us with some other quenching 

and chilling epithet. Now hear fancy speak, — 

" Her lips were red, and one was tliin, 
Compared with that was next her chin, 
Some bee had stung it newly." 

The real, red, bright being of the lip is there in a moment. 
But it is all outside ; no expression yet, no mind. Let us go a 
step farther with Warner, of fair Rosamond struck by Eleanor. 

" "With that she dashed her on the lips 
So dyed double red ; 
Hard was the heart that gave the blow, 
Soft were those lips that bled." 

The tenderness of mind begins to mingle with the outside 
color, the imagination is seen in its awakening. Next Shelley, — 

"Lamp of life, thy lips are burning 
Through the veil that seems to hide them, 
As the radiant hnes of morning 
Through thin clouds, ere they divide them." 

In Milton it happens, I think, generally, and in the case before 
us most certainly, that the imagination is mixed and broken 
with fancy, and so the strength of the imagery is part of iron 
and part of clay. 



318 rOETET. 

" Bring the rathe primrose, tliat forsaken dies (Imagination) 
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine (Nugatory) 
The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet — (Fancy) 
The glowing violet, (Imagination) 

The musk rose, and the well-attired woodbine, (Fancy, vulgar) 
"With cowslips wan, that hang the pensive head, (Imagination) 
And every flower that sad embroidery wears." (Mixed) 

Fancy, as she stays at the externals, can never feel. She is 
one of the hardest hearted of the intellectual faculties, or rather 
one of the most purely and simply intellectual. She cannot be 
made serious, no edge tools but she will play with ; whereas 
the imagination is in all things the reverse. She cannot be but 
serious ; she sees too far, too darkly, too solemnly, too earnestly, 
ever to smile. There is something in the heart of everything, 
if we can reach it, that we shall not be inclined to laugh at. The 
dvr;^i5fjLov yzKnd^a of the sea is on its surface, not in the deep. 

Now, observe, while, as it penetrates into the nature of 
things, the imagination is preeminently a beholder of things as 
they are, it is, in its creative function, an eminent beholder of 
things when and where they are not ; a seer, that is, in the 
prophetic sense, calling " the things that are not as though 
they were," and for ever delighting to dwell on that which ia 
not tangibly present. And its great function being the calling 
forth, or back, that which is not visible to bodily sense, it has 
of course been made to take delight in the fulfilment of its 
proper function, and preeminently to enjoy, and spend its 
energy, on things past and future, or out of sight, rather than 
things present, or in sight. So that if the imagination is to be 
called to take delight in any object, it will not be always well, 
if we can help it, to put the real object there, before it. The 
imagination would on the Avhole rather have it not there ; — the 
reality and substance are rather in the imagination's way; it 
would think a good deal more of the thing if it could not see 



POETRY. 319 

it. Hence, that strange and sometimes fatal charm, which 
there is in all things as long as we wait for them, and the 
moment we have lost them ; but which fades while we possess 
them ; — that sweet bloom of all that is far away, which perishes 
under our touch, ' Yet the feeling of this is not a weakness ; 
it is one of the most glorious gifts of the human mind, making 
the whole infinite future, and imperishable past, a richer inhe- 
ritance, if faithfully inherited, than the changeful, frail, fleeting 
present ; it is also one of the many witnesses in us to the truth 
that these present and tangible things are not meant to satisfy 
us. The instinct becomes a weakness only when it is weakly 
indulged, and when the faculty which was intended by God to 
give back to us what we have lost, and gild for us what is to 
come, is so perverted as only to darken what we possess. But, 
perverted or pure, the instinct itself is everlasting, and the 
substantial presence even of the things which we love the best, 
will inevitably and for ever be found wanting in one strange 
and tender charm, which belonged to the dreams of them»/ 

Greatness in art (as assuredly m all other things, but more 
distinctly in this than m most of tbem,)is not a teachable nor 
gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made 
great man ; that teach, or preach, or labor as you will, ever- 
lasting difference is set between one man's capacity and 
another's ; and that this God-given supremacy is the priceless 
thing, always just as rare in the world at one time as another. 
What you can manufacture, or communicate, you can lower 
the price of, but this mental supremacy is incommunicable ; 
you will never multiply its quantity, nor lower its price ; and 
nearly the best thing that men can generally do is to set them- 
selves, not to the attainment, but the discovery of this; learn- 
ing to know gold, when we see it, from iron-glance, and dia- 
monds ffom flint-sand, being for most of us a more profitable 
employment than trying to make diamonds out of our own 



y 



320 POETRY. 

charcoal. And for this God-made supremacy, I generally have 
used, and shall continue to use, the word Inspiration, not care- 
lessly nor lightly, but in all logical calmness and perfect reve- 
rence. 

There is reciprocal action between the intensity of moral 
feeling and the power of imagination ;,- for, on the one hand, 
those who have keenest sympathy are those who look closest, 
and pierce deepest, and hold securest ; and, on the other, 
those who have so jjierced and seen the melancholy deeps of 
things, are filled with the most intense passion and gentleness 
of sympathy. Hence, I suppose that the powers of the 
imagination may always be tested by accompanying tender- 
ness of emotion, and thus, (as Byron said,) there is no tender- 
ness like Dante's, neither any intensity nor seriousness like 
his, such seriousness that it is incapable of perceiving that 
which is commonplace or ridiculous, but fuses all down mto 
its white-hot fire. All egotism, and selfish care, or regard, 
are in proportion to their constancy, destructive of imagina- 
tion ; whose play and power depend altogether on our being 
able to forget ourselves and enter like possessing spirits into 
the bodies of things about us. 

Again, as the life of imagination is in the discovering ol 
truth, it is clear it can have no respect for sayings or opinions : 
knowing in itself when it has invented truly — restless and tor- 
mented except when it has this knowledge, its sense of success 
or failure is too acute to be affected by praise or blame. Sym- 
pathy it desires — but can do without ; of opinions it is regard- 
less, not in pride, but because it has no vanity, and is conscious 
of a rule of action and object of aim in which it cannot be mis- 
taken ; partly, also, in pure energy of desire and longing to do 
and to invent more and more, which sufier it not to suck the 
sweetness of jiraise — unless a little, with the end of the rod in 
its hand, and without pausing in its march. It goes straight 



POETEY. 321 

forward up the liill ; no voices nor matterings can turn it back, 
nor petrify it from its purpose. 

The imaguiation must be fed constantly by external nature 
— after the illustrations we have given, this may seem mere 
truism, for it is clear that to the exercise of the penetrative 
faculty a subject of penetration is necessary ; but I note it 
because many painters of powerful mind have been lost to the 
Morld by their suffering the restless writhing of their unagina- 
tion in its cage to take place of its healthy and exulting 
activity in the fields of nature. The most imaginative men 
always study the hardest, and are the most thirsty for new 
knowledge. Fancy plays like a squirrel in its circular prison, 
and is hajjpy ; but imagination is a pilgrim on the earth — and 
•^'her home is in heaven. Shut her from the fields of the celes- 
tial mountains — bar her from breathing their lofty, sun-warmed 
air ; and we may as well turn upon her the last bolt of the 
tower of famine, and give the keys to the keeping of the 
wildest sui-ge that washes Capraja and Gorgona. 

AVitness the operation of the imagination in Coleridge, on 
one of the most trifling objects that could possibly have been 
submitted to its action. 

" The thin blue flame 
Lies on my low-burut fire, and quivers not : 
Only that film which fluttered on the grate 
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing. 
Methiuks its motion in this hush of nature 
Gives it dim sympathies with me, who live, 
Making it a companionable form, 
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling spirit 
By its own moods interprets ; everywhere, 
Echo or mirror seeking of itself, 
And makes a toy of thought." 

Observe the sweet operation of fancy, m the following well- 

14* 



322 POETKT. 

known passage from Scott, where both her beholding and 
transforming powers are seen in their simplicity. 

" The rocky summits — split and rent. 
Formed turret, dome, or battlement. — 
Or seemed fantastically set 
With cupola or minaret. 
Nor were these earth-born castles bare, 
Nor lacked they many a banner fair, 
For from their shivered brows displayed, 
Far o'er th' unfathomable glade, 
All twinkling with the dew-drop sheen. 
The brier-rose fell, in streamers green, — 
And creeping shrubs of thousand dyes 
"Waved in the west wind's summer sighs." 

Compare with it the real and high action of the imagination 
on the same matter in Wordsworth's Yew trees (which I con- 
sider the most vigorous and solemn bit of forest landscape 
ever painted) : — 

" Eacli particular trunk a growth 
Of intertwisted fibres serpentine, 
Up coiling and inveterately convolved, 
Nor uninformed tvith Phantasy, and looks 
That threaten the profane." 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 



There are four ways in which beings supernatural may be 
conceived as manifesting themselves to human sense. The 
first, by external tyi>es, signs, or influences ; as God to Moses 
in the flames of the bush, and to Elijah in the voice of Horeb. 



THE SUPEKNATUEAL. 323 

The second, by the assuming of a form not properly belong- 
ing to them ; as the Holy Spirit of that of a Dove, the second 
person of the Trinity of that of a Lamb; and so such manifes- 
tations, under angelic or other form, of the first person of the 
Trinity, as seem to have been made to Abraham, Moses, and 
Ezekiel. 

The third, by the manifestation of a form properly belong- 
ing to them, but not necessarily seen ; as of the Risen Christ 
to his disciples when the doors were shut. And the fourth, 
by their operation on the human form, which they influence 
or inspire, as in the shining of the face of Moses. 

It is evident that in all these cases, wherever there is form 
at all, it is the form of some creature to us known. It is no 
new form peculiar to spirit, nor can it be. We can conceive 
of none. Our inquiry is simply, therefore, by what modifica- 
tions those creatm-e forms to ixs known, as of a lamb, a bii'd, 
or a human creature, may be explained as signs or habitations 
of Divuiity, or of angeUc essence, and not creatures such as 
they seem. 

This may be done m two ways. First, by effecting some 
change in the appearance of the creature inconsistent with its 
actual nature, as by giving it colossal size, or imnatural color, 
or material, as of gold, or silver, or flame, instead of flesh, or 
by taking away its property of matter altogether, and form- 
ing it of light or shade, or in an intermediate step, of cloud, 
or vapor; or explaining it by terrible concomitant circum- 
stances, as of wounds in the body, or stz-ange lights and 
seemiugs round about it ; or by joining of two bodies toge- 
ther as in angels' wings. Of all which means of attaining 
supernatural character (which, though in their nature ordinary 
and vulgar, are yet effective and very glorious in mighty 
hands) we have already seen the limits in speaking of th- 
imagination. 



324 POETKY. 

But the second means of oLtaining supernatural character ia 
that with which we are now concerned, namely, retaining the 
actual form in its full and material presence, and without aid 
from any external interpretation whatever, to raise that form 
by mere inherent dignity to such a pitch of power and 
impressiveness as cannot but assert and stamp it for super- 
human. 

He who can do this has reached the last pinnacle and 
utmost power of ideal, or any other art. He stands in no 
need, thenceforward, of cloud, nor lightning, nor tempest, nor 
terror of mystery. His sublime is independent of the 
elements. It is of that which shall stand when they shall melt 
with fervent heat, and light the firmament when the sun is as 
sackcloth of hair. 

The Greek could not conceive a spirit ; he could do nothing 
without limbs ; his god is a finite god, talking, pursuing, and 
going journeys ; if at any time he Avas touched with a true 
feeling of the unseen powers around him, it was in the field of 
poised battle, for there is something m the near coming of the 
shadow of death, something in the devoted fulfilment of 
mortal duty, that reveals the real God, though darkly ; that 
pause on the field of Platnsa was not one of vain superstition; 
the two white figures that blazed along the Delphic plain, 
when the earthquake and the fire led the charge from Olym- 
pus, were more than sunbeams on the battle dust ; the sacred 
cloud, with its lance light and triumph singing, that went 
down to brood over the masts of Salamis, was more than 
morning mist among the olives: and yet what were the 
Greek's thoughts of his god of battle ? No spirit power was 
in the vision; it was a being of clay strength and human 
passion, foul, fierce, and changeful ; of penetrable arms, and 
vulnerable flesh. Gather what we may of great, from pagan 



THE SUrEKNATUKAL. 32% 

chisel or pagan dream, and set it beside the orderer of Chris- 
tian warfare, Michael the Archangel : not Milton's " with 
hostile brow and visage all inflamed," not even Milton's in 
kingly treading of the hills of Paradise, not RaiFaelle's with 
the expanded wings and brandished spear, bnt Perugino'a 
with his triple crest of traceless plume unshaken in heaven, 
his hand fallen on his crossleted sword, the truth girdle bind- 
ing his undinted armor ; God has put his power upon him, 
resistless radiance is on his limbs, no lines are there of earthly- 
strength, no trace on the divme features of earthly anger ; 
trustful and thoughtful, fearless, but full of love, incapable 
except of the repose of eternal conquest, vessel and instru- 
ment of Omnij)otence, filled like a cloud with the victor light, 
the dust of principalities and powers beneath his feet, the 
murmur of hell against him heard by his spiritual ear like the 
winding of a shell on the far ofl^ sea-shore. 

It is vain to attemjjt to pursue the comparison; the two 
orders of art have in them nothing common, and the field of 
sacred history, the intent and scope of Christian feeling, are 
too wide and exalted to admit of the juxtaposition of any 
other sphere or order of conception ; they embrace all other 
fields like the dome of heaven. With what comparison shall 
we compare the types of the martyr saints, the St. Stephen of 
Fra Bartolomeo, with his calm forehead crowned by the stony 
diadem, or the St. Catherine of RafFaelle looking up to heaven 
in the dawn of the eternal day, with her lips parted in the 
resting from her pain? or with what the Madonnas of 
Francia and Pinturicchio, in whom the hues of the morning 
and the solemnity of eve, the gladness in accomplished pro- 
mise, and sorrow of the sword-pierced heart, are gathered 
into one human lamp of meffable love? or with what the 
angel choirs of Angelico, with the flames on their white fore- 
heads waving brighter as they move, and the sparkles strearr 



326 POETRY. 

ing from theix' purple wings like the glitter of many suns upon ) 
a sounding sea^ listening, in the pauses of alternate song, for > 
the prolonging of the trumpet blast, and the answering of 
; psaltery and cymbal, throughout the endless deep and from 
V all the star shores of heaven ? 

Bacon and Pascal appear to be men naturally very similar in 
their temper and j)owers of mind. One, born in York House, 
Strand, of courtly parents, educated in court atmosphere, and 
replying, ahnost as soon as he could speak, to the queen asking 
how old he was — " Two years younger than Your Majesty's 
happy reign !" — has the world's meanness and cunning 
engrafted uito his intellect, and remains smooth, serene, unen- 
thusiastic, and in some degree base, even with all his sincere 
devotion and universal wisdom ; bearing, to the end of life, the 
likeness of a marble palace in the street of a great city, fairly 
furnished within, and bright in wall and battlement, yet noi- 
some in places about the foundations. The other, born at 
Clermont, in Auvergne, under the shadow of the Puy de Dome, 
though taken to Paris at eight years old, retains for ever the 
impress of his birthplace ; pursuing natural philosophy with 
the same zeal as Bacon, he returns to his own mountains to 
put himself under their tutelage, and by their help first disco- 
vers the great relations of the earth and the air : struck at 
last with mortal disease ; gloomy, enthusiastic, and supersti- 
tious, with a conscience burning like lava, and inflexible like 
iron, the clouds gather about the majesty of him, fold after 
fold ; and, with his spirit buried in ashes, and rent by earth- 
quake, yet fruitful of true thought and faithful affection, he 
stands like that mound of desolate scoria that crowns the hill 
ranges of his native land, with its sable summit far in heaven, 
and its foundations green with the ordered garden and the 
trclUsed vine. 



SH AKESPERE. 327 

When, howeA^er, o\ir inquiry thus branches into the succes- 
sive analysis of individual characters, it is time for us to leave 
it ; noting only one or two points respecting Shakespere. He 
seems to have been sent essentially to take universal and 
equal grasp of the human nature ; and to have been removed, 
therefore, from all influences which could in the least warp or 
bias his thoughts. It was necessary that he should lean no 
way ; that he should contemplate, with absolute equality of 
judgment, the life of the court, cloister, and tavern, and be 
able to sympathize so completely with all creatures as to 
deprive himself, together with his personal identity, even of 
his conscience, as he casts himself into their hearts. He must 
be able to enter into the soul of Falstaff or Shylock with no 
more sense of contempt or horror than Falstaff or Shylock 
themselves feel for or in themselves ; otherwise his own con- 
science and indignation would make him unjust to them ; 
he would turn aside from something, miss some good, or 
overlook some essential palliation. He must be utterly with- 
out anger, utterly without purpose ; for if a man has any 
serious purpose in life, that which runs counter to it, or is 
foreign to it, Avill be looked at frowningly or carelessly by 
him. Shakespere was foi'bidden of Heaven to have any 
plans. To do any good or get any good, in the common sense 
of good, was not to be within his permitted range of work. 
Not, for him, the founding of institutions, the preaching of doc- 
trines, or the repression of abuses/^JSTeither he, nor the sun, 
did, on any morning that they rose together, receive charge 
from their Maker concerning such things. They were 
both of them to shine on the evil and good ; both to behold 
unoffendedly all that was upon the earth, to burn unappalled 
upon the spears of kings, and imdisdaming, upon the reeds of ; 
the river. 

Thei-efore, so fxr as nature had influence over the early 



328 POETRY. 

training of this man, it was essential to his perfectness that tl e 
nature should be quiet. No mountain passions were to be 
allowed in him. Inflict upon him but one pang of the monas- 
tic conscience ; cast upon him but one cloud of the mountain 
gloom ; and his serenity had been gone for ever — his equity — 
his infinity. You would have made another Dante of him ; 
and all that he would have ever uttered about poor, soiled, and 
fraU humanity would have been the quarrel between Sinon 
and Adam of Brescia, — speedily retired from, as not worthy a 
man's hearing, nay, not to be heard without heavy fault. AU 
your Falstaffs, Slenders, Quicklys, Sir Tobys, Lances, Touch- 
stones, and Quinces would have been lost in that. Shakespere 
could be allowed no mountains ; nay, not even any supreme 
natural beauty. He had to be left with his kingcups and clo- 
ver ; — pansies — the passing clouds — the Avon's flow — and the 
undulating hills and woods of Warwick ; nay, he was not to 
love even these m any exceeding measure, lest it might make 
him in the least overrate their power upon the strong, fuU- 
fledged minds of men. He makes the quarrelling fairies con- 
cerned about them ; poor lost Ophelia find some comfort in 
them ; fearful, fair, wise-hearted Perdita trust the speaking of 
her good will and good hostess-shij) to them ; and one of the 
brothers of Imogen confide his sorrow to them, — rebuked 
instantly by his brother for " wench-like words ;*" but any 

* " With fairest flowers 

"WhOe summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele, 
I'll sweeten thy sad grave. Thou shalt not lack 
The flower that's like thy face — pale primrose, nor 
The azui'ed harebell — like thy veins ; no, nor 
The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander, 
Outsweetened not thy breath. The ruddock would 
With charitable bill bring thee all this ; 
Yea, and furred moss besides, when flowers are none 
To winter-ground thy corse. 



^ 



SHAKESPEKE. 329 

thought of them in his mighty men I do not find : it is not 
usually in the nature of such men ; and if he had loved the 
flowers the least better himself, he would assuredly have been 
offended at this, and given a botanical turn of mind to Caesar, 
or Othello. 

And it is even among the most curious proofs of the neces- 
sity to all high imagination that it should paint straight from 
the life, that he has not given such a turn of mind to some of 
his great men ; — Henry the Fifth, for instance. Doubtless 
some of my readers, having been accustomed to hear it 
repeated thoughtlessly from mouth to mouth that Shakespere 
conceived the spirit of all ages, were as much offended as 
surprised at my saying that he only painted human nature as 
he saw it in his own time. They will find, if they look into 
his work closely, as much antiquarianism as they do geogra- 
phy, and no more. The commonly received notions about 
the things that had been, Shakespere took as he found them, 
animating them with pure human nature, of any time and all 
time ; but inquiries into the minor detail of temporary feeling, 
he despised as utterly as he did maps ; and wheresoever the 
temporary feeling was m anywise contrary to that of his own 
day, he errs frankly, and paints from his own time. For 
instance in this matter of love of flowers; we have traced 

Gui. Prithee, have done, 

And do not play in wench-like words with that 
Which is so serious." 

Imogen herself; afterwards in deeper passion, will give weeds — not flowers 
—and something more: 

" A.nd when 
"With wildwood leaves, and weeds, I have strewed liis grave^ 
And on it said a century of prayers. 
Such as I can, twice o'er, I'U weep and sigh, 
And, leaving so his service, follow you." 



330 POETRY. 

already, far enough for our general purposes, tl e mediabvai 
interest in them, whether to be enjoyed in the fields, or to be 
used for types of ornamentation in dress. If Shakespere had 
cared to enter into the spirit even of the early fifteenth cen- 
tury, he would assuredly have marked this aifection in some 
of his knights, and indicated, even then, in heroic tenlpers, 
the peculiar respect for loveliness of dress which we find con- 
stantly in Dante. But he could not do this ; he had not seen 
it in real life. Li his time dress had become an affectation 
and absurdity. Only fools, or wise men in their weak 
moments, showed much concern about it; and the facts of 
human nature which appeared to him general in the matter 
were the soldier's disdain, and the coxcomb's care of it. Hence 
Shakesi^erc's good soldier is almost always in plain or battered 
armor ; even the speech of Vernon in Henry the Fourth, 
which, as far as I remember, is the only one that bears fully 
upon the beauty of armor, leans more upon the spirit and 
hearts of men — "bated, like eagles having lately bathed;" 
and has an under-cux-rent of slight contempt running through 
the following Une, " Glittering in golden coats, like images y" 
while the beauty of the young Harry is essentially the beauty 
of fiery and perfect youth, answering as much to the Greek, 
or Roman, or Elizabethan knight as to the mediaeval one ; 
whereas the definite interest in armor and dress is o^jposed by 
Shakespere in the French (meaning to depreciate them), to 
the English rude soldierliness : 

" Con. Tut, I have the beat armor of the world. Would it were day ! 
Orl. You have an excellent armor, but let my horse have his due." 

And again : 

" My lord constable, the armor that I saw in your tent to-night, are those 
Btars, or suns, upon it?" 



SHAKESPERE. 331 

while Henry, half proud of his poorness of array, speaks of 
armorial splendor scornfully ; the main idea being still of its 
being a gilded show and vanity — 

" Our gayness and our gilt are all besmirched." 

This is essentially Elizabethan. The quarterings on a knight's 
shield, or the inlaying of his armor, would never have been 
thought of by him as mere " gayness or gilt" in earlier days.* 
In like manner, throughout every scale of rank or feeling, 
from that of the French knights down to Falstaff's " I looked 
he should have sent me two-and-twenty yards of satin, as I 
am true knight, and he sends me security !" care for dress is 
always considered by Shakespere as contemptible ; and Mrs. 
Quickly distinguishes herself from a true fairy by her solici- 
tude to scour the chairs of order — and " each fair instalment, 
coat, and several crest ;" and the association in her mind of 
the flowers in the fairy rings with the 

"Sapphire, pearl, and rich embroidery, 
Buckled below fair knighthood's bending knee ;" 

while the true fairies, in field simplicity, are only anxious to 
" sweep the dust behind the door ;" and 

" With this field dew consecrate, 
Every several chamber bless 
Through this palace with sweet peace." 

Note the expression " Field dew consecrate." Shakspere 

* If the reader thinks that in Henry the Fifth's time the Elizabethan tem- 
per might already have been manifesting itself, let him compare the English 
herald's speech, act 2, scene 2, of King John ; and by way of si^ecimen o/ 
Shakspere's historical care, or regard of mediaeval character, the large use 
of artillery in the previous scene. 



332 POETRY. 

loved courts and camps ; but he felt that sacredness and peace 
were in the dew of the Fields only. 

There is another respect in which he was wholly incapable 
of entering into the spirit of the middle ages. He had no 
great art of any kind around him in his own country, and 
was, consequently, just as powerless to conceive the general 
influence of former art, as a man of the most inferior calibre. 
Therefore it was, that I did not care to quote his authority 
when speaking on a former occasion respecting the power of 
imitation. If it had been needful to add his testimony to 
that of Dante), I might have quoted multitudes of passages 
wholly concurring with that, of which the "fair Portia's 
counterfeit," with the following lines, and the implied ideal 
of sculpture in the Winter's Tale, are wholly unanswerable 
instances. But Shakespere's evidence in matters of art is as 
narrow as the range of Elizabethan art in England, and 
resolves itself wholly into admiration of two things, — mock- 
ery of life (as in this instance of Hermione as a statue), or 
absolute splendor, as in the close of Romeo and Juliet, where 
the notion of gold as the chief source of dignity of aspect, 
coming down to Shakespere from the times of the Field of 
the Cloth of Gold, and, as I said before, strictly Elizabethan, 
would interfere seriously with the pathos of the whole pas- 
sage, but for the sense of sacrifice imjilied in it : 

" As rich shall Romeo by his lady lie, 
Poor sacrifices of our enmity." 

And observe, I am not giving these examples as proof of 

any sraallness in Shakespere, but of his greatness ; that is to 

say, of his contentment, like every other great man who ever 

-j-breathed, to paint nothing but what he saw ; and therefore 

giving perpetual evidence that his sight was of the sixteenth, 



THE ARTIFICIAL AND TUE NATURAL. 333 

and not of the thirteenth century, beneath all the broad and 
eternal humanity of his imagination. How far in these 
modern days, emptied of splendor, it may be necessary for 
great men having certain sympathies for those earlier ages, to 
act in this differently from all their predecessors ; and how 
far they may succeed in the resuscitation of the past by habi- 
tually dwelling in all their thoughts among vanished genera- 
tions, are questions, of all practical and jaresent ones con- 
cerning art, the most difficult to decide ; for already in poetry 
several of our truest men have set themselves to this task, 
and have indeed put more vitality into the shadows of the 
dead than most others can give the presences of the living. 
Thus Longfellow, in the Golden Legend, has entered more 
closely into the temper of the Monk, for good and for evil, than 
ever yet theological writer or historian, though they may have 
given their life's labor to the analysis: and, again, Robert 
Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the 
middle ages. _4i. 

At the close of the last century, the architecture, domestic 
life and manners were gradually getting more and more arti- 
ficial ; all natural beauty had ceased to be permitted in archi- 
tectural decoration, while the habits of society led them more 
and more to live, if possible, in cities ; and the dress, language, 
and manners of men, in general, were approximating to that 
horrible and lifeless condition in which you find them, just 
before the outbreak of the French Revolution. 

Now, observe : exactly as hoops, and starch, and false hair, 
and all that in mind and heart these things typify and betray, 
as these, I say, gained upon men, there was a necessary reaction 
in favor of the natural. Men had never lived so utterly in 
defiance of the laAvs of nature before ; but they could not do 
this without feeling a strange charm in that which they defied; 



334 roETKY. 

and accordingly we find this reactionary sentiment expressing 
itself in a base school of what was called pastoral j^oetry ; that 
is to say, poetry written in praise of the country, by men who 
lived in coffee-houses and on the Mall. The essence of pas- 
toral poetry is the sense of strange delightfulness in grass, 
which is occasionally felt by a man who has seldom set his 
foot on it ; it is essentially the poetry of the cockney, and for 
the most part corresponds in its aim and rank, as compared 
with other literature, to the porcelain shepherds and shep- 
herdesses on a chimney-piece as compared with great works 
of sculpture. 

Of course all good poetry, descriptive of rural life, is essen- 
tially pastoral, or has the effect of the pastoral, on the minds 
of men living in cities ; but the class of poetry which I mean, 
and which you j^robably understand, by the term pastoral, is 
that in which a farmer's girl is spoken of as a " nymph," and 
a farmer's boy as a "swain," and in which, throughout, a 
ridiculous and unnatural refinement is supposed to exist in 
rural Ufe, merely because the poet himself has neither had the 
courage to endure its hardships, nor the wit to conceive its 
realities. If you examine the literature of the past century, 
you will find that nearly all its expressions, ha^ ing reference 
to the country, show something of this kind ; either a foolish 
sentimentality, or a morbid fear, both of course coupled with ~ 
the most curious ignorance. Tou will find all its descriptive 
expressions at once vague and monotonous. Brooks are 
always " purling ;" birds always " warbling ;" mountains al- 
Avays " lift their horrid peaks above the clouds ;" vales always 
" are lost in the shadow of gloomy woods ;" a few more dis- 
tinct ideas about haymaking and curds and cream, acquired 
m the neighbourhood of Richmond Bridge, serving to give an 
occasional appearance of freshness to the catalogue of the sub- 
lime and beautiful which descended from poet to poet ; while 



PASTORAL POETRY. 335 

a few true pieces of pastoral, like the " Vicar of Wakefield," 
and Walton's "Angler," relieved the general waste of dulness. 
Even in these better productions, nothing is more remarkable 
than the general conception of the country merely as a series 
of green fields, and the combined ignorance and dread of more 
sublime scenery ; of which the mysteries and dangers were 
enhanced by the difficulties of travelling at the period. Thus 
in Walton's " Angler," you have a meeting of two friends, 
one a Derby shir eman, the other a lowland traveller, who is as 
much alarmed, and uses nearly as many expressions of asto- 
nishment, at having to go down a steep hill and ford a bi"ook, 
as a traveller uses now at crossing the glacier of the Col de 
Geant. I am not sure whether the difficulties which, until 
late years, have lain in the way of peaceful and convenient 
travelling, ought not to have great weight assigned to them 
among the other causes of the temper of the century ; but be 
that as it may, if you will examine the whole range of its 
literature — keeping this point in view — I am well persuaded 
that you will be struck most forcibly by the strange deadnesg 
to the higher sources of landscape sublimity which is mingled 
with the morbid pastoralism. The love of fresh air and green 
grass forced itself upon the animal natures of men ; but that 
of the sublimer features of scenery had no place in minds 
whose chief powers had been repressed by the formalisms of 
the age. And although in the second-rate writers continually, 
and in the first-rate ones occasionally, you find an afiectation 
of interest in mountains, clouds, and forests, yet whenever 
they write from their heart, you wUl find an utter absence of 
feeling respecting anything beyond gardens and grass. Exa- 
mine, for instance, the novels of Smollett, Fielding, and Sterne, 
the comedies of Moliere, and the Avritings of Johnson and 
Addison, and I do not think you will find a single expression 
of true delight in sublime nature in any one of them. Per- 



336 POETRY. 

hups Sterne's " Sentimental Journey," in its total absence of 
sentiment on any subject but humanity, and its entire want 
of notice of anything at Geneva, which might not as well have 
been seen at Coxwold, is the most striking instance I could 
give you ; and if you compare with this negation of feeling on 
one side, the intea'ludes of Moli6re, in which sheiDherds and 
shepherdesses are introduced in court dress, you have a very 
accurate conception of the general spirit of the age. 

It was m such a state of society that the landscape of 
Claude, Gaspar Poussin, and Salvator Rosa attamed its repu- 
tation. It is the complete expression on canvas of the spirit 
of the time. Claude embodies the foolish pastoralism, Salva- 
tor the ignorant terror, and Gaspar the dull and affected 
erudition. 

It was, however, altogether impossible that this state of 
things could long continue. The age which had buried itself 
in formalism grew weary at last of the restraint ; and the ap- 
proach of a new sera was marked by the appearance, and the 
enthusiastic reception, of writers who took delight in those 
wild scenes of nature which had so long been despised. 

I think the first two writers in whom the symptoms of a 
change are strongly manifested are Mrs. Radcliffe and Rous- 
seau ; in both of whom the love of natural scenery, though 
mingled in the one case with what Avas merely dramatic, and 
in the other with much that was pitifully morbid or vicious, 
was still itself genuine, and intense, differing altogether in 
character from any sentiments previously traceable in litera- 
ture. And then rapidly followed a group of writers, who 
expressed, in various ways, the more powerful or more pui-e 
feeling which had now become one of the strongest instincts 
of the age. Of these, the principal is Walter Scott. Many 
Avriters, indeed, describe nature more minutely and more 
profoundly ; but none show in higher intensity the peculiar 



LOVE OF NATURE. 337 

passion for what is majestic or lovely in loild nature, to which 
I am now referring. The whole of the poem of the " Lady 
of the Lake " is written with almost a boyish enthusiasm for 
rocks, and lakes, and cataracts; the early novels show the 
same instinct in equal strength wherever he approaches High- 
land scenery ; and the feeling is mingled, observe, with a most 
touching and affectionate appreciation of the Gothic architec- 
ture, in which alone he found the elements of natural beauty 
seized by art ; so that, to this day, his descriptions of Melrose 
and Holy Island Cathedral, in the " Lay of the Last Minstrel" 
and " Marmion," as well as of the ideal abbeys in the " Monas- 
tery" and " Antiquary," together with those of Caerlaverock 
and Lochleven Castles in "Guy Mannering" and "The Abbot," 
remain the staple possessions and text-books of all travellers, 
not so much for their beauty or accuracy, as for their exactly 
expressing that degree of feeling with which most men in this 
century can sympathise. 

Together with Scott appeared the group of poets, — Byron, 
Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and, finally, Tennyson, — differ- 
ing widely in moral principles and spiritual temper, but all 
agreeing more or less in this love for natural scenery. 

Now, you will ask me — and you will ask me most reason- 
ably — how this love of nature in modern days can be connected 
with Christianity, seeing it is as strong in the infidel Shelley 
as in the sacred "Wordsworth. Yes, and it was found in far 
worse men than Shelley. Shelley was an honest unbeliever, 
and a man of warm affections ; but this new love of nature is 
found in the most reckless and unprincipled of the French 
novelists, — in Eugene Sue, in Dumas, ia George Sand, — and 
that intensely. How is this ? Simply because the feeHng is 
reactionary ; and, in tliis phase of it, common to the diseased 
mind as well as to the healthy one. A man dying in the fever 
of intemperance will cry out for water, and that with a bitterer 

15 



838 POETKT. 

thirst than a man whose healthy frame naturally delights in 
the mountain spring more than in the wine cup. The water 
is not dishonored by the thirst of that diseased, nor is nature 
dishonored by the love of the unworthy. That love is, per- 
haps, the only saving element in their minds ; and it still 
remains an indisputable truth that the love of nature is a ) 
characteristic of the Christian heart, just as the hunger for 
healthy food is characteristic of the healthy frame. 

I think it probable that many readers may be surprised at my 
calling Scott the great representative of the mind of the afje 
in literature. Those who can perceive the intense penetrative 
depth of "Wordsworth, and the exquisite finish and melodious 
power of Tennyson, may be oifended at my placing in higher 
rank that poetry of careless glance, and reckless rhyme, in 
which Scott poured out the fancies of his youth ; and those 
who are familiar with the subtle analysis of the French novelists, 
or who have in any wise submitted themselves to the influence 
of German philosophy, may be equally indignant at my ascribing 
a principality to Scott among the literary men of Europe, in 
an age which has produced De Balzac and Goethe. 

I believe the first test of a truly great man is his humility 
I do not mean, by humility, doubt of his own power, or hesitar 
tion in speaking of his opinions ; but a right understanding of 
the relation between what he can do and say, and the rest of the 
world's sayings and doings. All great men not only know their 
business, but usually know that they know it; and are not 
only right in their main opinions, but they usually know that 
they are right in them ; only they do not think much of them-' 
selves on that account, Arnolfo knows he can build a good 
dome at Florence ; Albert Durer writes calmly to one who had 
found fault with his work, " It cannot be better done ;" Sir 
Isaac Newton knows that he has worked out a problem or 



HUMIUTY OF GREATNESS. 339 

two that would liave puzzled anybody else ; — only they do not 
expect their fellow-men therefore to fall down and worship 
them ; they have a curious under-sense of powerlessness, feeling 
that the greatness is not in them, but through them ; that 
they could not do or be anything else than God made them. 
And they see something divine and God-made in every other 
man they meet, and are endlessly, foolishly, and incredibly 
merciful. 

Now, I find among the men of the present age, as far as I 
know them, this character in Scott and Tui'ner pre-eminently ; 
I am not sure if it is not in them alone. I do not find Scott 
talking about the dignity of literature, nor Turner about the 
dignity of painting. They do their work, feeling that they 
cannot well help it ; the story must be told, and the effect put 
down ; and if people like it, well and good ; and if not, the 
world will not be much the worse. 

I believe a very different impression of their estimate of 
themselves and their doings Avill be received by any one who 
reads the conversations of Wordsworth or Goethe, The 
slightest manifestation of jealousy or self-complacency is enough 
to mark a second-rate character of the intellect ; and I fear that, 
especially in Goethe, such manifestations are neither few nor 
slight. 

Connected with this general humility is the total absence 
of affectation in these men, — that is to say, of any assump- 
tion of manner or behavior in their work, in order to attract 
attention. Not but that they are mannerists both. Scott's 
verse is strongly mannered, and Turner's oil jiainting ; but 
•the manner of it is necessitated by the feelings of the men, 
entirely natural to both, never exaggerated for the sake of 
show. I hardly know any other literary or pictorial work of 
the day which is not in some degree affected. I am afraid 
Wordsworth was often affected in his simplicity, and De Balzac 



340 roETKY. 

in his finish. Many fine French writers are affected in their 
reserve, and full of stage tricks in placing of sentences. It ia 
lucky if in German writers we ever find so much as a sentence 
without affectation. 

Again : another very important, though not infallible test of 
greatness is, as we have often said, the appearance of Ease 
with which the thing is done. It may be that, as with Dante 
and Leonardo, the finish given to the work effaces the evidence 
of ease ; but where the ease is manifest, as in Scott, Turner, and 
Tintoret ; and the thing done is very noble, it is a strong reason 
for placing the men above those Avho confessedly work with 
great pains. Scott writing his chapter or two befoi'e breakfast 
— not retouching, Turner finishing a whole drawing in a fore- 
noon before he goes to shoot (providing always the chapter 
and drawing be good), are instantly to be set above men who 
confessedly have spent the day over the work, and think the 
hours well spent if it has been a little mended between sunrise 
and sunset. Indeed, it is no use for men to think to appear 
great by working fast, dashing, and scrawling ; the thing they 
do must be good and great, cost what time it may ; but if it he 
so, and they have honestly and unaffectedly done it with no 
effort^ it is probably a greater and better thing than the result 
of the hardest efforts of others. 

Then, as touching the kind of work done by these two men, 
; the more I think of it I find this conclusion more impressed 
/upon me, — that the greatest thing a human soul ever does in 
( this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. 
\Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but 
thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly, is 
^5oetry, prophecy, and religion, — all in one. J 

Therefore, finding the world of Literature more or less divided 
into Thinkers and Seers, I believe we shall find also that the 
Seers are wholly the greater race of the two. A true Thinker, 



TUE TIUNKEUS AND TUE SEERS. 341 

who has practical purpose in his thinking, and is sincere, as 
Plato, or Carlyle, or Helps, becomes m some sort a seer, and 
must be always of infinite use in his generation; but an aflfected 
Thinker, who supposes his thinking of any other importance 
than as it tends to work, is about the vainest kind of person 
that can be found in the occuj)ied classes. Nay, I believe that 
metaphysicians and philosophers are, on the whole, the greatest 
troubles the world has got to deal with ; and that Avhile a tyrant 
or bad man is of some use in teaching people submission or 
indignation, and a thoroughly idle man is only harmful in setting 
an idle example, and communicating to other lazy people liis 
own lazy misunderstandings, busy metaphysicians are always 
entangling good and active people, and weaving cobwebs 
among the finest wheels of the world's business ; and are as 
much as possible, by all prudent persons, to be brushed out of 
their way, like spiders, and the meshed weed that has got into 
the Cambridgeshire canals, and other such impediments to 
barges and business. And if we thus clear the metaphysical 
element out of modern literature, we shall find its bulk amaz- 
ingly diminished, and the claims of the remaining writers, or 
of those whom we have thinned by this abstraction of their 
straw stuffing, much more easily adjusted.* 

Again : the mass of sentimental literature, concerned with the 
analysis and description of emotion, headed by the poetry of 
Byron, is altogether of lower rank than the literature which 
merely describes what it saAV. The true Seer always feels as 
intensely as any one else ; but he does not much describe his 

* Observe, I do not speak thus of metaphysics because I have no pleasure 
in them. When I speak contemptuously of philology, it may be answered 
me, that I am a bad scholar ; but I cannot be so answered touching meta- 
physics, for every one conversant with such subjects may see that I have 
strong inclination that way, which would, indeed, have led me far astray long 
ago, if I had not learned also some use of my hands, eyes, and feet. 



342 POETKY. 

feelings. He tells you whom he met, and what they said 
leaves you to make out, from that, what they feel, and wha* 
he feels, but goes into little detail. And, generally speaking 
pathetic writing and careful explanation of passion are quite 
easy, compared with this plain recording of what people said 
or did, or with the right invention of what they are likely to 
say and do ; for this reason, that to invent a story, or admirably 
and thoroughly tell any part of a story, it is necessaiy to grasp 
the entire mind of every personage concerned in it, and know 
precisely how they would be affected by what happens ; w^hich 
to do requires a colossal intellect ; but to describe a separate 
emotion delicately, it is only needed that one should feel it 
oneself; and thousands of people are capable of feeling this or 
that noble emotion, for one who is able to enter into all the 
feelings of somebody sitting on the other side of the table. 
Even, therefore, when this sentuiiental literature is first rate, 
as in passages of Byron, Tennyson, and Keats, it ought not to 
be ranked so high as the Creative ; and though perfection, 
even in narrow fields, is perhaps as rare as in the wider, and it 
may be as long before we have another In Memoriam as another 
Guy Mannering, I unhesitatingly receive as a greater manifesta- 
tion of power the right invention of a few sentences spoken by 
Pleydell and Mannering across theu' supper-table, than the most 
tender and passionate melodies of the self-examining verse. 

Having, therefore, cast metaphysical writers out of our way, 
and sentimental writers into the second rank, I do not think 
Scott's supremacy among those who remain will any more be 
doubtful ; nor would it, perhaps, have been doubtful before, had 
it not been encumbered by innumerable faults and weaknesses. 
But it is pre-eminently in these faults and weaknesses that 
Scott is representative of the mind of his age : and because he 
is the greatest man born amongst us, and intended for the 
enduring type of us, all our principal faults must be laid on liis 



WEAKNESSES OF THE AGE, 343 

shoulders, and he must bear down the dark marks to the latest 
ages ; while the smaller men, who have some special work to do, 
perhaps not so much belonging to this age as leading out of it 
to the next, are often kept providentially quit of the encum- 
brances which they had not strength to sustain, and are much 
smoother and pleasanter to look at, in theu* way ; only that is 
a smaller way. 

Thus, the most startling fault of the age being its faithlessness, 
it is necessary that its greatest man should be faithless. Nothing 
is more notable or sorrowful in Scott's mind than its incapacity 
of steady belief in anything. He cannot even resolve hardily 
to believe in a ghost, or a water-spirit ; always explains them 
away in an apologetic manner, not believing, all the while, 
even his own explanation. He never can clearly ascertain 
whether there is anything behind the ari-as but rats; never 
draws swords, and thrusts at it for life or death ; but goes on 
looking at it timidly, and saying, " it must be the wind." He 
is educated a Presbyterian, and remains one, because it is the 
most sensible thing he can do if he is to live in Edinburgh ; but 
he thinks Romanism more picturesque, and profaneness more 
gentlemanly : does not see that anything affects human life but 
love, courage, and destiny ; which are, indeed, not matters of 
faith at all, but of sight. Any gods but those are very misty 
in outline to him ; and when the love is laid ghastly in poor 
Charlotte's coffin ; and the courage is no more of use, — the pen 
having fallen irom between the fingers ; and destiny is sealing 
the scroll, — the God-light is dim in the tears that fall on it. 

He is in aU this the epitome of his epoch. 

Again : as another notable weakness of the age is its habit 
of looking back, in a romantic and passionate idleness, to the 
past ages, not understanding them all the whUe, nor really 
desiring to understand them, so Scott gives up nearly the half 
of his intellectual power to a fond, yet purposeless, dreaming 



344 POETKY. 

over the past, and sjDends half his literary labors in endeavors 
to revive it, not in reality, but on the stage of fiction ; endeavors 
which were the best of the kind that modernism made, but still 
successful only so far as Scott put, under the old armor, the 
everlasting human nature which he knew ; and totally unsuc- 
cessful, so far as concerned the j^ainting of the armor itself, 
Avhich he knew not. The excellence of Scott's work is precisely 
in proportion to the degree in which it is sketched from present 
nature. His familiar life is inimitable ; his quiet scenes of 
introductory conversation, as the beginning of Rob Roy and 
Redgauntlet, and all his Uving Scotch characters, mean or noble, 
from Andrew Fairservice to Jeanie Deans, are simply right, and 
can never be bettered. But his romance and antiquarianism, 
his knighthood and monkery, are all false, and he knows them 
to be false ; does not care to make them earnest ; enjoys them 
for their strangeness, but laughs at his own antiquarianism, all 
through his own third novel, — with exquisite modesty indeed, 
but with total misunderstanding of the function of an Antiquary, 
He does not see how anything is to be got out of the past but 
confusion, old iron on drawing-room chairs, and serious incon- 
venience to Dr. Heavystei'ne. 

Again : more than any age that had preceded it, ours had 
been ignorant of the meaning of the word "Art." It had not 
a single fixed principle, and Avhat unfixed principles it worked 
upon were all wrong. It was necessary that Scott should 
know nothing of art. He neither cared for painting nor sculp- 
ture, and was totally incapable of forming a judgment about 
them. He had some confused love of Gothic architecture, 
because it was dark, picturesque, old, and like nature ; but 
could not tell the Avorst from the best, and built for himself 
perhaps the most incongruous and ugly pile that gentlemanly 
modernism ever designed ; marking, in the most curious and 
subtle way, that minglmg of reverence with irreverence which 



THE POETRY OF SCOTT. 345 

IS SO striking in the age ; lie reverences Melrose, yet casts one 
of its piscinas, puts a modern steel grate into it, and makes it 
his fireplace. Like all pure moderns, he supposes the Gothic 
barbarous, notwithstanding his love of it; admires, in an 
equally ignorant way, totally opposite styles ; is delighted 
with the new town of Edinburgh ; mistakes its dulness foi 
purity of taste, and actually compares it, in its deathful for- 
mality of street, as contrasted with the rudeness of the old 
toAvn, to Britomart taking off her annor. 

Again : as in reverence and irreverence, so in levit and 
melancholy, we saw that the spirit of the age was strangely 
interwoven. Therefore, also, it is necessary that Scott should 
be light, careless, unearnest, and yet eminently sorrowful. 
Throughout all his work there is no evidence of any purpose 
but to while away the hour. His life had no other object than 
the pleasure of the instant, and the establishing of a family 
name. All thoughts Avere, in their outcome and end, less 
than nothing, and vanity. And yet, of all poetry that I know, 
none is so sorrowful as Scott's. Other great masters are 
pathetic in a resolute and predetermined way, when they 
choose; but, in their own minds, are evidently stern, or hope- 
ful, or serene ; never really melancholy. Even Byron is rather 
sulky and desperate than melancholy ; Keats is sad because 
he is sickly ; Shelley because he is imj^ious ; but Scott is 
inherently and consistently sad. Around all his power, and 
brightness, and enjoyment of eye and heart, the far-away 
^olian knell is for ever sounding ; there is not one of those 
loA ing or laughing glances of his but it is brighter for the 
film of tears ; his mind is like one of his own hill rivers, — it is 
Avhite, and flashes in the sun fairly, careless, as it seems, and 
hasty in its going, but 

15* 



346 roKTKY. 

■' Far beneath, where slow they creep 
From pool to eddy, dark and deep, 
"Where alders moist, and willows weep, 
You hear her streams repine." 

Life begins to pass from him very early ; and whUe Homer 
sings cheerfully in his blindness, and Dante retains his courage, 
and rejoices in hope of Paradise, through all his exile, Scott, 
yet hardly past his youth, lies pensive in the sweet sunshine 
and among the harvest of his native hUls. 

" Blackford, on whose uncultured breast, 

Among the broom, and thorn, and whin, 
A tniant boy, I sought the nest, 
Or listed as I lay at rest, 

While rose on breezes thin 
The murmur of the city crowd, 
And, from his steeple jangling loud, 

St. Giles's mingling din I 
Now, from the summit to the plain, 
Waves all the hill with yellow grain ; 

And on the landscape as I look. 
Nought do I see unchnnged remain, 

Save the rude cliffs and chiming brook ; 
To me they make a heavy moan 
Of early friendships past and gone." 

Such, then, being the weaknesses which it was necessary 
that Scott should share with his age, in order that he might 
sufBcieutly represent it, and such the grounds for supposing 
him, in spite of all these weaknesses, the greatest literary 
man whom that age produced, let us glance at the principal 
points in which his view of landscape differs from that of the 
mediaevals. 

I shall not endeavor now, as I did with Homer and Dante, 
to give a complete analysis of all the feelings w"hich appear to 



SCOTT'S METHOD OF TKEATLNG LANDSCAPE. 347 

be traceable in Scott's allusions to landscape scenery, — for 
this would require a volume, — but only to indicate the main 
points of differing character between his temper and Dante's. 
Then we will examine in detail, not the landscape of literature, 
but that of painting, which must, of course, be equally, or even 
in a higher degree, characteristic of the age. 

And, first, observe Scott's habit of looking at nature neither 
as dead, or merely material, in the way that Homer regards 
it, nor as altered by his own feelings, in the way that Keats 
and Tennyson regard it, but as having an animation and pathos 
of its own^ wholly irrespective of human j^resence or passion, 
— an animation which Scott loves and sympathizes with, as he 
would with a fellow-creature, forgetting himself altogether, 
and subduing his own humanity before what seems to him the 
power of the landscape. 

" Yon lonely thorn, — would he could tell 
The changes of his parent dell, 
Since he, so grey and stubborn now, 
Waved in each breeze a sapling bough I 
"Would he could tell, how deep the shade 
A thousand mingled branches made, 
How broad the shadows of the oak, 
How clung the rowan to the rock, 
And through the foliage showed his head, 
With narrow leaves and berries red!" 

Scott does not dwell on the grey stubbornness of the thorn, 
because he himself is at that moment disposed to be duU, or 
stubborn ; neither on the cheerful peeping forth of the rowan, 
because he himself is at that moment cheei'ful or curious : but 
he perceives them both with the kind of interest that he would 
take in an old man, or a climbing boy ; forgetting himseli^ in 
sympathy with either age or youth. 



S48 POETKY. 

■' And from the grassy slope he sees 
The Greta flow to meet the Tees, 
Where issuing from lier darksome led, 
She caught the morning's eastern red, 
And through the softening vale below 
Rolled her bright waves in rosy glow, 
All blushing to her bridal bed. 
Like some shy maid, in convent bred; 
WhUe linnet, lark, and blackbird gay 
Sing forth her nuptial roundelay." 

Is Scott, or are the persons of his story, gay at this moment? 
Far from it. Neither Scott nor Risingham are hapi:)y, but 
the Greta is : and Scott's sympathy is ready for the Greta, on 
the instant. 

Observe, therefore, this is not pathetic fallacy ; for there is 
no passion in Scott which alters natm-e. It is not the lover's 
passion, making him think the larkspurs are listening for his 
lady's foot ; it is not the miser's passion, making him think 
that dead leaves are falling coins ; but it is an inherent and 
continual habit of thought, which Scott shares with the mo- 
derns in general, bemg, in fact, nothing else than the instinctive 
sense which men must have of the Divine presence, not formed 
into distmct belief. In the Greek it created, as we saw, the 
faithfully believed gods of the elements : in Dante and the me- 
diaevals, it formed the faithfully believed angelic presence : in 
the modern, it creates no perfect form, does not apprehend dis- 
tinctly any Divine being or operation ; but only a dim, slightly 
credited animation in the natural object, accompanied with 
great interest and affection for it. This feehng is quite uni- 
versal with us, only varying in depth according to the 
greatness of the heart that holds it ; and in Scott, being more 
than usually intense, and accompanied with infinite affection 
and quickness of sympathy, it enables him to conquer all ten- 
dencies to the pathetic fallacy, and, instead of making Nature 



SCOTT'S SYMPATUY WITU NATURE. 349 

nnywise subordinate to himself, he makes himself subordinate 
to her — follows her lead simply — does not venture to bring his 
own cares and thoughts mto her pure and quiet presence — 
paints her in her simple and universal truth, adding no result 
of momentary passion or fancy, and appears, therefore, at first 
shallower than other poets, being in reality Avider and healthier. 
" What am I ?" he sa3's continually, " that I should trouble 
this sincere nature with my thoughts. I happen to be feverish 
and depressed, and I could see a great many sad and strange 
things in those waves and flowers ; but I have no business to 
see such things. Gay Greta ! sweet harebells ! you are not 
sad nor strange to most people ; you are but bright water and 
blue blossoms ; you shall not be anything else to me, except 
that I cannot help thinking you are a Httle alive, — no one 
can helj) thmking that." And thus, as Nature is bright, 
serene, or gloomy, Scott takes her temper, and paints her as 
she is ; nothing of himself being ever intruded, except that 
far-away Eolian tone, of which he is unconscious ; and some 
times a stray syllable or two, like tliat about Blackford Hill, 
distinctly stating personal feeling, but all the more modestly 
for that distinctness, and for the clear consciousness that it is 
not the chiming brook, nor the corn-fields, that are sad, but 
only the boy that rests by them ; so returning on the instant 
to reflect, in all honesty, the image of Nature as she is meant 
by all to be received ; nor that in fine words, but in the first 
that come ; nor with comment of far-fetched thoughts, but 
with easy thoughts, such as all sensible men ought to have in 
such places, only spoken sweetly ; and evidently also with an 
undercurrent of more profound reflection, which here and there 
murmurs for a moment, and Avhich I think, if we choose, we 
may continually pierce down to, and drink deeply from, but 
which Scott leaves us to seek, or shun, at our pleasure. 

And in consequence of this unselfishness and humility, Scott'a 



350 POETKY. 

enjoyment of Nature is incomparably greater than that of any 
other poet I know. All the rest carry their cares to her, and 
begin maundering in her ears about their own affairs. Ten- 
nyson goes out on a furzy common, and sees it is calm autumn 
sunshine, but it gives him no pleasure. He only remembers 
that it is 

" Dead calm in that noble breast 
Which heaves but with the heaving deep." 

He sees a thundercloud in the evening, and would have 
" doted and pored" on it, but cannot, for fear it should biing 
the ship bad weather. Keats drinks the beauty of Nature 
violently ; but has no more real sympathy with her than he 
has with a bottle of claret. His palate is fine ; but he " bursts 
joy's grape against it," gets nothing but misery, and a bitter 
taste of dregs out of his desperate draught. 

Byron and Shelley are nearly the same, only with less truth 
of pei'ception, and even more troublesome selfishness. Words- 
worth is more like Scott, and imderstands how to be happy, 
but yet cannot altogether rid himself of the sense that he is a 
philosopher, and ought always to be saying something wise. 
He has also a vague notion that Nature would not be able to 
get on well without Wordsworth ; and finds a considerable 
part of his pleasure in looking at himself, as well as at her. 
But with Scott the love is entirely humble and unselfish. " I, 
Scott, am nothing, and less than nothing ; but these crags, 
and heaths, and clouds, how great they are, how lovely, how 
for ever to be beloved, only for their own silent, thoughtless 
sake !" 

This pure passion for nature in its abstract being, is still 
increased in its intensity by the two elements above taken 
notice of, — the love of antiquity, and the love of color and 



ANTIQUITl. 351 

beautiful form, mortified in our streets, and seeking for food 
in the wilderness and the ruin : both feelings, observe, instinc- 
tive in Scott from his childhood, as everything that makes a 
man great is always. 

" And well the lonely infant knew 
Recesses where the wallflower grfew, 
And honeysuckle loved to crawl, 
Up the long crag and ruined wall. 
I deemed such nooks the sweetest shade 
The sun in all its round surveyed." 

Not that these could have been instinctive in a child in the 
Middle Ages. The sentiments of a people increase or diminish 
in intensity from generation to generation, — every disposition 
of the parents affecting the frame of the mind in their off- 
spring : the soldier's child is born to be yet more a soldier, and 
the politician's to be still more a politician ; even the slightest 
colors of sentiment and affection are transmitted to the heirs 
of life ; and the crowning expression of the mind of a people 
is given when some infant of highest capacity, and sealed with 
the impress of this national character, is born where providen- 
tial circumstances permit the full development of the powers 
it has received straight from Heaven, and the passions which it 
has inherited from its fathers. 

This love of ancientness, and that of natural beauty, associ- 
ate themselves also in Scott with the love of liberty, which 
was indeed at the root even of all his Jacobite tendencies in 
politics. For, putting aside certain predilections about landed 
property, and family name, and " gentlemanliness" in the club 
sense of the word, — respecting which I do not now inquire 
whether they were weak or wise, — the main element which 
makes Scott like Cavaliers better than Puritans is, that he 
thinks the former free and masterful as well as loyal ; and 



362 POETRY. 

the latter formal and slavish. He is loyal, not so much in 
respect for law, as in unselfish love for the king ; and his sym- 
pathy is quite as ready for any active borderer who breaks the 
law, or fights the king, in what Scott thinks a generous way^ 
as for the king himself. Rebellion of a rough, free, and bold 
kind he is always delighted by; he only objects to rebellion 
on princijDle and in form : bare-headed and open-throated trea- 
son he wUl abet to any extent, but shrinks from it in a peaked 
hat and starched collar : nay, pohtically, he only delights in 
kingship itself, because he looks upon it as the head and 
centre of liberty ; and thinks that, keeping hold of a king's 
hand, one may get rid of the cramps and fences of law ; and 
that the people may be governed by the whistle, as a High- 
land clan on the open hill-side, instead of being shut up into 
hurdled folds or hedged fields, as sheep or cattle left masterless. 
And thus nature becomes dear to Scott in a threefold way : 
dear to him, first, as containing those remams or memories 
of the past, which he cannot find in cities, and giving hope 
of Praetorian mound or knight's grave, in every green slope 
and shade of its desolate places ; — dear, secondly, in its moor- 
land hberty, which has for him just as high a charm as the 
fenced garden had for the mediaeval : 

" For I was wayward, bold, and wild, 
A self-willed imp — a grandame's child; 
But, half a plague, and half a jest, 
"Was still endured, beloved, caressed ; 
For me, thus nurtured, dost thou ask 
The classic poet's well-conned task? 
Nay, Erskine, nay. On the wild hill 
Let the wild heathbell flourish stiU ; 
Cherish the tuUp, prune the vine ; 
But freely let the woodbine twine, 
And leave untrimmed the eglantine;" 

— and dear to him, finally, in that perfect beauty, denied alike 



' LOVE OF COLOK. 353 

in cities and in men, for which every modern heart had begun 
at last to thirst, and Scott's, in its freshness and power, of all 
men's, most earnestly. 

And in this love of beauty, observe, that (as I said we might 
except) the love of color is a leading element, his healthy 
mind being incapable of losing, under any modern false teach- 
ing, its joy in brilliancy of hue. Though not so subtle a 
colorist as Dante, which, under the cii'cumstances of the age, 
he could not be, he depends quite as much upon color for his 
power or pleasure. And, in general, if he does not mean to 
say much about things, the one character which he will give is 
color, using it with the most perfect mastery and faithfulness, 
up to the point of jjossible modern perception. For instance, 
if he has a sea-storm to paint in a single line, he does not, as 
a feebler poet would probably have done, use any expression 
about the temper or fonn of the waves ; does not call them 
angry or mountainous. He is content to strike them out with 
two dashes of Tintoret's favorite colors : 

" The hlackening wave is edged luith white ; 
To inch and rock the seamews fly." 

There is no form in this. N"ay, the main virtue of it is, tliat 
it gets rid of all form. The dark raging of the sea — what 
form has that ? But out of the cloud of its dai'kness thos(i 
lightning flashes of the foam, coming at their terrible intervals 
— you need no more. 

Again : where he has to describe tents mingled among oaks, 
he says nothing about the form of either tent or tree, but only 
gives the two strokes of color : 

" Thousand paviUons, white as snow, 
Chequered the borough moor below, 
Oft giving way, where still there stood 
Some relics of the old oak wood, 



354 POETEY. 



That darkly huge did iutervene, 

And tamed the glaring white with green!* 

Again : of tents at Flodden : 

" Next morn the Baron dimbed the tower, 
To view, afar, the Scottish power, 

Encamped on Flodden edge. 
The white pavilions made a show, 
Like remnants of the winter snow, 

Along the dusky ridge." 

Again : of trees mingled with dark rocks : 

" Until, where Teith's young waters roll 
Betwixt him and a wooded knoll, 
That graced the sahU strath with green. 
The chapel of St. Bride was seen." 

Again: there is hardly any form, only smoke and color, 
in his celebrated desci-iption of Edinburgh ; 

" The wandering eye could o'er it go, 
And mark the distant city glow 

"With gloomy splendor red ; 
For on the smoke-wreaths, huge and slow. 
That round her sable turrets flow, 

The morning beams were shed. 
And tinged them with a lustre proud, 
Like that which streaks a thunder-cloud. 
Such dusky grandeur clothed the height. 
Where the huge castle holds its state. 

And all the steep slope down, 
Whose ridgy back heaves to the sky, 
Piled deep and massy, close and high, 

Mine own romantic town I 
But northward far with purer blaze. 
On Ocliil mountains fell the rays, 



LOVE OF COLOR. 355 

And as each heathy top they kissed, 
It gleamed a purple amethyst. 
Yonder the shores of Fife you saw ; 
Here Preston Bay and Berwick Law: 

And, broad between them rolled, 
The gallant Frith the eye might note, 
Whose islands on its bosom float, 

Like emeralds chased in gold." 

I do not like to spoil a fine passage by italicizing it ; but 
observe, the only hints at form, given throughout, are in the 
somewhat vague words, "ridgy," "massy," "close," and 
" high :" the whole being still more obscured by modern mys- 
tery, in its most tangible form of smoke. But the colors are 
all definite ; note the rainbow band of them — gloomy or dusky 
red, sable (pure black), amethyst (pure purple), green, and 
gold — a noble chord throughout ; and then, moved doubtless 
less by the smoky than the amethystine part of the group, 

" Fitz Eustace' heart felt closely pent, 
The spur he to his charger lent, 

And raised his bridle hand. 
And making demivolle in air, 
Cried, ' Where's the coward would not dare 
To fight for such a land V " 

I need not multiply examples : the reader can easily trace 
for himself, through verse familiar to us all, the force of these 
color instincts. I will therefore add only two passages, not 
so completely known by heart as most of the poems in which 
they occur. 

" 'Twas silence all. He laid hun down 
Where purple heath profusely strown, 



35G POETKY. 

And throatwort, with its azure belL 

And moss and thyme his cushion swelL 

There, spent with toil, he Ustless eyed 

The course of Greta's playful tide ; 

Beneath her banks, now eddying dun, 

Now brightly gleaming to the sun, 

As, dancing over rock and stone, 

In yellow light her currents shone, 

Matching in hue the favorite gem 

Of Albin's mountain diadem. 

Then tired to watch the current play, 

He turned his weary eyes away 

To where the bank opposing showed 

Its huge square cliffs through shaggy wood. 

One, promuient above the rest. 

Reared to the sun its pale grey breast ; 

Around its broken summit grew 

The hazel rude, and sable yew ; 

A thousand varied lichens dyed 

Its waste and weather-beaten side ; 

And round its rugged basis lay. 

By time or thunder rent away, 

Fragments, that, from its frontlet torn, 

"Were mantled now by verdant thorn." 

Note, first, what an exquisite chord of color is given in the 
succession of this passage. It begins with purple and blue ; 
then passes to gold, or cairngorm color (topaz color) ; then to 
pale grey, through which the yellow passes into black ; and 
the black, through broken dyes of lichen, into green. Note, 
secondly, — what is indeed so manifest throughout Scott's 
landscape as hardly to need j^ointing out, — the love of rocks, 
and true understanding of their colors and characters, opposed 
as it is in every conceivable way to Dante's hatred and misun- 
derstanding of them. 

I have already traced, in various places, most of the causes 



LOVE OF COLOR. 357 

of this great difference : namely, first, the ruggedness of north- 
ern temper (compare § 8. of the chapter on the Nature of 
Gothic in the Stones of Venice) ; then the really greater beauty 
of the northern rocks, as noted when we were speaking of the 
Apennine limestone ; then the need of finding beauty among 
them, if it were to be found anywhere, — no well-arranged 
colors being any more to be seen in dress, but only iji rock 
lichens; and, finally, the love of irregularity, liberty, and 
power, springing up in glorious opposition to laws of prosody, 
fashion, and the five orders. 

The other passage I have to quote is still more mteresting ; 
because it has no form in it at all except in one word (cha- 
lice), but wholly composes its imagery either of color, or of 
that delicate half-believed life which we have seen to be so 
important an element in modern landscape. 

" The summer dawn's reflected hue 
To purple changed Loch Katrine blue ; 
Mildly and soft the western breeze 
Just kissed the lake ; just stirred the trees ; 
And the pleased lake, like maiden coy, 
Trembled, hut dimpled not, for joy ; 
The mountain-shadows on her breast 
Were neither broken nor at rest; 
In bright uncertainty they lie, 
Like future joys to Fancy's eye. 
The water-lily to the light 
Her chalice reared of silver bright : 
The doe awoke, and to the lawn. 
Begemmed with dew-drops, led her fawn ; 
The grey mist left the mountain side ; 
The torrent showed its glistening pride ; 
Invisible in flecked sky, 
The lark sent down her revelry ; 
The blackbird and the speckled thrush 
Good-morrow gave from brake and bush; 



358 POETKY. 

In answer cooed the cushat dove 
Her notes of peace, and rest, and love.' 

Two more considerations are, however, suggested by the 
above passage. The first, that the love of natural history, 
excited by the continual attention now given to all wild land- 
scape, heightens reciprocally the interest of that landscape, and 
becomes an important element in Scott's description, leading 
him to finish, down to the minutest speckling of breast, and 
slightest shade of attributed emotion, the portraiture of birds 
and animals ; in strange opposition to Homer's slightly named 
"sea-crows, who have care of the works of the sea," and 
Dante's singing-birds, of undefined species. Compare care- 
fully a passage, too long to be quoted, — the 2nd and 3rd stan- 
zas of canto VI. of Rokeby. 

The second, and the last point I have to note, is Scott's 
habit of drawing a slight moral from every scene, just enough 
to excuse to his conscience his want of definite religious "feel- 
ing ; and that this slight moral is almost always melancholy. 
Here he has stopped short without entirely expressing it — 

" The mountain shadows 

• he 
Like future joys to Fancy's eye." 

His completed thought would be, that those future joys, like 
the mountain shadows, were never to be attained. It occurs 
fully uttered in many other places. He seems to have been 
constantly rebuking his own worldly pride and vanity, but 
never purposefully : 

" The foam-globes on her eddies ride, 
Thick as the schemes of human pride 
That down life's current drive amain, 
Aa frail, as frothy, and as vain." 



A SUNSET. 369 

" Foxglove, and nightshade, side by side, 
Emblems of punishment and pride." 

" Her dark eye flashed ; she paused and sighed ;— 
' Ah, what have I to do with pride I' " 

And hear the thought he gathers from the sunset (noting 
first the Turnerian color, — as usual, its principal element) : 

" The sultry summer day is done. 
The western hills have hid the sun. 
But mountain peak and village spire 
Retain reflection of his fire. 
Old Barnard's towers are purple stUl, 
To those that gaze from Toller Hill ; 
Distant and high the tower of Bowea 
Like steel upon the anvil glows; 
And Stanmore's ridge, behind that lay, 
Rich with the spoils of parting day. 
In crimson and in gold arrayed, 
Streaks yet awhile the closing shade ; 
Then slow resigns to darkening heaven 
The tints which brighter hours had given. 
Thus, aged men, full loth and slow, 
The vanities of life forego. 
And count their youthful follies o'er 
Till Memory lends her light no more." 

That is, as far as I remember, one of the most finished pieces 
of sunset he has given ; and it has a woful moral ; yet one 
which, with Scott, is inseparable from the scene. 
Hark, agaro : 

" 'Twere sweet to mark the setting day 
On Bourhope's lonely top decay ; 
And, as it faint and feeble died 
On the broad lake and mountain's side, 



360 POETRY. 

To say, ' Thus pleasures fade away ; 
Toutli, talents, beauty, thus decay, 
And leave us dark, forlorn, and grey.' " 

And again, hear Bertram : 

" Mine be the eve of tropic sun : 
With disk like battle target red. 
He rushes to his burning bed, 
Dyes the wide wave with bloody light. 
Then sinks at once ; and all is night." 

In all places of this kind, where a passing thought is sug- 
gested by some external scene, that thought is at once a slight 
and sad one. Scott's deeper moral sense is marked in the 
conduct of his stories, and in casual reflections or exclamations 
arising out of their plot, and therefore sincerely uttered ; as 
that of Marmion : 

" Oh, what a tangled web we weave, 
( When first we practise to deceive !" 

But the reflections which are founded, not on events, but 
on scenes, are, for the most part, shallow, partly insincere, and, 
as far as sincere, sorrowful. This habit of inefiective dream- 
ing and moralizing over passing scenes, of which the earliest 
type I know is given in Jaques, is, as aforesaid, usually the 
satisfaction made to our modern consciences for the want of a 
sincere acknowledgment of God in nature: and Shakspere 
has marked it as the characteristic of a mind " compact of 
jars." 

In the reading of a great poem, in the hearing of a noble 
oration, it is the subject of the writer and not his skill, — ^his 



TWO ORDERS OF POETS. 361 

passion, not his power, on which our minds are fixed. We see 
as he sees, but we see not him. "We become part of him, feel 
with him, judge, behold with him ; but we think of him as lit- 
tle as of ourselves. Do we think of ^schylus while we wait on 
the silence of Cassandra, or of Shakspere, while we listen to 
the wailing of Lear ? Not so. The power of the masters is 
known by their self-annihilation. It is commensurate with the 
degree in which they themselves appear not in their work. 
The harp of the minstrel is untruly touched, if his own glory 
is all that it truly records. Every great writer may be at 
once known by his guiding the mind far from himself to the 
beauty which is not of his creation, and the knowledge which 
is past his finding out. 

I admit two orders of poets, but no third ; and by these two 
orders I mean the Creative (Shakspere, Homer, Dante), and 
Reflective or Perceptive (Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson). 
But both of these must be Jtrst-rnio. in their range, though 
their range is difierent ; and with poetry second-rate in quality 
no one ought to be allowed to trouble mankind. There is 
quite enough of the best, — much more than we can ever read 
or enjoy in the length of a life ; and it is a literal wrong or sin 
in any person to encumber us with inferior work. I have no 
patience with apologies made by young pseudo-poets, " that 
they believe there is some good in what they have written : 
that they hope to do better in time," &c. Some good ! If 
there is not all good, there is no good. If they ever hope to 
do better, why do they trouble us now ? Let them rather 
courageously burn all they have done, and wait for the better 
days. There are few men, ordinarily educated, who in moments 
of strong feeling could not strike out a poetical thought, and 
afterwards polish it so as to be presentable. But men of sense 
know better than so to waste their time ; and those who sin- 

16 



362 POETRY. 

cerely love poetry, know the touch of the master's hand on 
the chords too well to fumble among them after him. Nay, 
more than this ; all inferior poetry is an injury to the good, 
inasmuch as it takes away the freshness of rhymes, blunders 
upon and gives a wi'etched commonalty to good thoughts ; 
and, in general, adds to the weight of human weariness in a 
most woful and culpable manner. There are few thoughts 
likely to come across ordinary men, which have not already 
been expressed by greater men in the best possible way ; and 
it is a wiser, more generous, more noble thing to remember 
and point out the perfect words, than to invent poorer ones, 
wherewith to encumber temporarily the world. 

Keats, describing a wave, breaking, out at sea, says of it — 

" Down whose green back the short-lived foam, all hoar, 
Bursts gradual, with a wayward indolence." 

That is quite perfect, as an example of the modern manner. 
The idea of the peculiar action with which foam rolls down a 
long, large wave could not have been given by any other 
words so well as by this " wayward indolence." But Homer 
would never have written, never thought of, such words. He 
could not by any possibility have lost sight of the great fact 
that the wave from the beginning to the end of it, do what it 
might, was still nothing else than salt water; and that salt 
water could not be either wayward or indolent. He will call 
the waves "over-roofed," "full-charged," "monstrous," "com- 
pact-black," "dark-clear," "violet-colored," "wine-colored," 
and so on. But every one of these epithets is descriptive of 
pure physical nature. " Over-roofed" is the term he invariably 
uses of anything — rock, house, or wave — that nods over at 
the brow ; the other terms need no explanation ; they are as 



ALTEKABIIJTY, 363 

accurate and intense in truth as words can be, but they never 
show the slightest feeling of anything animated in the ocean. 
Black or clear, monstrous or violet-colored, cold salt water 
it is always, and nothing but that. 

. And thus, in full, there are four classes ; the men who feel 
nothing, and therefore see truly ; the men who feel strongly, 
think weakly, and see untruly (second order of poets) ; the 
men who feel strongly, think strongly, and see truly (first 
order of poets) ; and the men who, strong as human creatures 
can be, are yet submitted to influences stronger than they 
and see in a sort untruly, because what they see is inconceiv 
ably above them. This last is the usual condition of prophetic 
inspiration. 

I separate these classes, in order that their character may be 
cleai'ly understood ; but of course they are united each to the 
other by imperceptible transitions, and the same mind, accord- 
ing to the influences to which it is subjected, passes at difierent 
times into the various states. Still, the difierence between the 
great and less man is, on the whole, chiefly in this point of 
alterahility. That is to say, the one knows too much, and per- 
ceives and feels too much of the past and future, and of all 
things beside and around that which immediately afiects him, 
to be in any wise shaken by it. His mind is made up; his 
thoughts have an accustomed current ; his ways are steadfast ; 
it is not this or that new sight which will at once unbalance 
him. He is tender to impression at the surface, like a rock with 
deep moss upon it ; but there is too much mass of him to be 
moved. The smaller man, with the same degree of sensibility, 
is at once carried off" his feet ; he wants to do something he did 
not want to do before ; he views all the universe in a new light 
through his tears ; he is gay or enthusiastic, melancholy or 
passionate, as things come and go to him. Therefore the high 



364 POETEY. 

creative poet luiglit even be thought, to a great extent, 
unpassive (as shallow people thmk Dante stern), receiving 
indeed all feelings to the full, but having a great centre of 
reflection and knowledge in which he stands serene, and watches 
the feeling, as it were, fi-om far off. 

Dante, in his most intense moods, has entire command of 
himself, and can look around calmly, at all moments, for the 
image or the word that will best tell what he sees to the upper 
or lower world. But Keats and Tennyson, and the poets of 
the second order, are generally themselves subdued by the 
feelings under which they write, or at least, write as choosing 
to be so, and therefore admit certain expressions and modes of 
thought which are in some sort diseased or false. 

Now so long as we see that the feeling is true, we pardon, 
or are even pleased by, the confessed fallacy of sight which it 
induces. But the moment the mind of the speaker becomes 
cold, that moment every such expression becomes untrue, as 
being for ever untrue in the external facts. And there is no 
greater baseness in literature than the habit of using these 
metaphorical expressions in cool blood. An inspired writer, 
in full impetuosity of passion, may speak wisely and truly of 
" raging Avaves of the sea, foaming out their own shame ;" but 
it is only the basest writer who cannot speak of the sea without 
talking of "raging waves," "remorseless floods," "ravenous 
billows," &c. ; and it is one of the signs of the highest power in 
a writer to check all such habits of thought, and to keep his 
eyes fixed firmly on the jpure fact^ out of which if any feeling 
comes to him or his reader, he knows it must be a true one. 

To keep to the waves, I forget who it is who represents 
a man in despair, desu'ing that his body may be cast into the 
sea, 

" Whose changing mound, and foam that passed away, 
Might mock the eye that questioned where I lay." 



ACCURACY OF EXPRESSION. 365 

Observe, there is not a single false, or even overcharged, 
expression. " Mound" of the sea wave is perfectly simple and 
true ; " changing " is as familiar as may be ; " foam that passed 
away," strictly literal ; and the whole line descriptive of the 
reality with a degree of accuracy which I know not any other 
verse, in the range of poetry, that altogether equals. For most 
people have not a distinct idea of the clumsiness and massive- 
ness of a large wave. The word " wave " is used too generally 
of ripples and breakers, and bendings in light drapery or grass ; 
it does not by itself convey a perfect image. But the word 
"mound" is heavy, large, dark, definite; there is no mistaking 
the kind of wave meant, nor missing the sight of it. Then the 
term " changing " has a peculiar force also. Most people think 
of waves as rising and falling. But if they look at the sea 
carefully, they will perceive that the waves do not rise and 
fall. They change. Change both place and form, but they 
do not fall ; one wave goes on, and on, and still on ; now 
lower, now higher, now tossing its mane like a horse, now 
building itself together like a Avail, now shaking, now steady, 
but still the same wave, till at last it seems struck by something, 
and changes, one knows not how, — becomes another wave. 

The close of the line insists on this image, and paints it still 
more perfectly, — " foam that passed away." Not merely melt- 
ing, disappeai-ing, but passing on, out of sight, on the career 
of the wave. Then, having put the absolute ocean fact as far 
as he may before our eyes, the poet leaves us to feel about it 
as we may, and to trace for ourselves the opposite fact, — the 
image of the green mounds that do not change, and the white 
and written stones that do not pass away ; and thence to follow 
out also the associated images of the calm life with the quiet 
grave, and the despairing life with the fading foam ; — 

" Let no man move his bones." 
" As for Samaria, her Icing is cut off hke the foam upon the water." 



3G6 rOETBY. 

But nothing of this is actually told or pointed out, and the 
expressions, as they stand, are perfectly severe and accurate, 
utterly uninfluenced by the firmly governed emotion of the 
writer. Even the word " mock " is hardly an exception, as it 
may stand merely for "deceive" or "defeat," without implying 
any impersonation of the waves. 

It may be well, perhaps, to give an instance to show the pecu- 
liar dignity possessed by all passages which limit their expression 
to the pure fact, and leave the hearer to gather what he can 
from it. Here is a notable one from the Eiad. Helen, looking 
from the Scsean gate of Troy over the Grecian host, and telling 
Priam the names of its captains, says at last : — 

" I see all the other dark-eyed Greeks ; but two I cannot see, — Castor and 
Pollux, — whom one mother bore with me. Have they not followed from 
fair Lacedaemon, or have they indeed come in their sear wandering ships, but 
now will not enter into the battle of men, fearing the shame and the scorn 
that is in me ?" 

Then Homer : — 

" So she spoke. But them, already, the life-giving earth possessed, there in 
Lacedaemon, in the dear fatherland." 

Note, here, the high poetical truth carried to the extreme. 
The poet has to speak of the earth in sadness, but he will not 
let the sadness affect or change his thoughts of it. No ; though 
Castor and Pollux be dead, yet the earth is our mother still, 
fruitful, life-giving. These are the facts of the thing. I see 
nothing else than these. Make what you will of them. 

Take another very notable instance from CasimirdelaVigne'a 
terrible ballad, " La Toilette de Constance." I must quote a 
few luies out of it here and there, to enable the reader who has 
not the book by him to understand its close. 



"la toilette DE CONSTANCE." 367 

" Vite, Anna, vite ; au miroir 

Plus vite, Anna. L'heure s'avance, 
Et je vais au bal ce soir 
Chez I'ambassadeur de France. 

T pensez vous, ils sont fanes, ces nceuds, 

Us sont d'hier, mon Dieu, comme tout paase I 
Que du reseau qui retient mes cheveux 

Les glands d'azur retombent arec grdce. 

Plus haut 1 Plus bas I Vous ne comprenez rien I 

Que sur mon front ce sapbir etinceUe : 
Vous me piquez, mal-adroite. Ah, c'est bien, 

Bien, — chere Anna I Je t'aime, je suis belle. 

Celui qu'eu vain je voudrais oublier 

(Anna, ma robe) 11 y sera, j'esp^re. 
(Ah, fi, profane, est-ce la mon collier ? 

Quoi ! ces grains d'or benits par le Saint P^re I) 
II 7 sera ; Dieu, s'il pressait ma main 

En y pensant, a peine je respire : 
Pere Anselmo doit m'entendre domain, 

Comment ferai-je, Anna, pour tout lui dire ? 

Vite, un coup d'ceil au miroir, 

Le dernier. J'ai I'assurance 

Qu'on va m'adorer ce soir 

Chez I'ambassadeur de France. 

Pres du foyer, Constance s'admirait. 

Dieu ! sur sa robe il vole une ^tincelle 1 
Au feu. Courez ; Quand Tespoir renivrait 

Tout perdre ainsi I Quoi! Mourir, — et si belle I 
L'horrible feu ronge avec volupt6 

Ses bras, son sein, et I'entoure, et s'eleve, 
Et sans pitie devore sa beaute, 

Ses dixhuit ans, helas, et son doux rdve I 



308 POETBT. 

Adieu, bal, plaisir, amour! 

On disait, Pauvre Constance I 
Et on dansait, jusqu'au jour, 

Chez I'ambassadeur de France." 

Yes, that is the fact of it. Right or wrong, the poet does not 
say. What you may think about it, he does not know. He 
has nothing to do with that. There he the ashes of the dead 
girl in her chamber. There they danced, till the morning, at 
the Ambassador's of France. Make what you will of it. 

If the reader will look through the baUad, of which I have 
quoted only about the third part, he will find that there is 
not, from beginning to end of it, a single poetical (so called) 
expression, except in one stanza. The girl speaks as simple 
prose as may be ; there is not a word she would not have actually 
used as she was dressing. The poet stands by, impassive as a 
statue, recording her words just as they come. At last the 
doom seizes her, and in the very presence of death, for an 
instant, his o'wti emotions conquer him. He records no longer 
the facts only, but the facts as they seem to him. The fire 
gnaws with volupttcoustiess — without pity. It is soon past. 
The fate is fixed for ever ; and he retires into his pale and crystal- 
line atmosphere of truth. He closes all with the calm veracity, 

" They said, ' Poor Constance I' " 

Now in this there is the exact type of the consummate 
poetical temperament. For, be it clearly and constantly re- 
membered, that the greatness of a poet depends upon the two 
faculties, acuteness of feeling, and command of it. A poet is 
great, first in proportion to the strength of his passion, and 
then, that strength being granted, in proportion to his govern- 
ment of it ; there being, however, always a point beyond which 
it would be inhuman and monstrous if he pushed this govern- 



ACUTENESS OP FEELING. 369 

ment, and, therefore, a point at which all feverish and wild fancy 
becomes just and true. Thus the destruction of the kingdom 
of Assyria cannot be contemplated firmly by a prophet of 
Israel. The fact is too great, too wonderful. It overthrows 
him, dashes him into a confused element of dreams. All the 
world is, to his stunned thought, full of strange voices. " Yea, 
the fir-trees rejoice at thee, and the cedars of Lebanon, saying, 
' Since thou art gone down to the grave, no feller is come up 
against us.' " So, still more, the thought of the presence of 
Deity cannot be borne without this great astonishment. " The 
mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, 
and aU the trees of the fields shall clap their hands." 

But by how much this feeling is noble when it is justified by 
the strength of its cause, by so much it is ignoble when there 
is not cause enough for it ; and beyond aU other ignobleness is 
the mere afiectation of it, in hardness of heart. Simply bad 
writing may almost always, as above noticed, be known by its 
adoption of these fanciful metaphorical expressions, as a sort 
of current coin ; yet there is even a worse, at least a more 
harmful, condition of writing than this, in which such expres- 
sions are not ignorantly and feelinglessly caught up, but, by 
some master, skilful in handling, yet insincere, dehberately 
wrought out with chill and studied fancy ; as if we should try 
to make an old lava stream look red-hot again, by covering it 
with dead leaves, or white-hot, with hoar-frost. 

When Young is lost in veneration, as he dwells on the 
character of a truly good and holy man, he permits him- 
self for a moment to be overborne by the feehng so far as to 
exclaim — 

" "Where shall I find him ? angels, tell me where. 
You know him ; he is near you ; point him out 
Shall I see glories beaming from his brow, 
Or trace his footsteps by the rising flowers ?" 
16* 



370 POETBY. 

This emotion has a worthy cause, and is thus true and right, 
But now hear the cold-hearted Pope say to a shepherd girl — 

" Where'er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade I 
Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade ; 
Your praise the birds shall chant in every grove, 
And winds shall waft it to the powers above. 
But would you sing, and rival Orpheus' strain, 
The wondering forests soon should dance again ; 
The moving mountains hear the powerful call, 
And headlong streams hang, listening, in their fall." 

This is not, nor could it for a moment be mistaken for, the 
language of passion. It is simple falsehood, uttered by hypo- 
crisy; definite absurdity, rooted in affectation, and coldly 
asserted in the teeth of nature and fact. Passion will indeed 
go far in deceiving itself; but it must be a strong passion, not 
the simple wish of a lover to tempt his mistrees to sing. 
Compare a very closely parallel passage in Wordsworth, in 
which the lover has lost his mistress : 

" Three years had Barbara in her grave been laid, 
When thus his moan he made: — 

' Oh, move, thou cottage, from behind yon oak, 

Or let the ancient tree uprooted lie. 
That in some other way yon smoke 

May mount into tlie sky. 
If still behind yon pine-tree's ragged bough, 

Headlong, the waterfall must come, 

Oh, let it, then, be dumb — 
Be anything, sweet stream, but that which thou art now.' " 

Here is a cottage to be moved, if not a mountain, and a 
waterfall to be silent, if it is not to hang listening; but with 



THE PATHETIC FALLACY. 3Vl 

what different relation to the mind, that contemplates them ! 
Here, in the extremity of its agony, the soul cries out wildly 
for relief, which at the same moment it partly knows to be 
impossible, but partly beUeves possible, in a vague impression 
that a mu-acle might be wrought to give relief even to a less 
sore distress, — that nature is kind, and God is kind, and that 
grief is strong ; it knows not well what is possible to such 
grief. To silence a stream, to move a cottage wall, — one 
might think it could do as much as that ! 

I believe these instances are enough to illustrate the main 
point I insist upon respecting the pathetic fallacy, — that so 
far as it is a fallacy, it is always the sign of a morbid state of 
mind, and comparatively of a weak one. Even in the most 
inspired prophet it is a sign of the incapacity of his human 
sight or thought to bear what has been revealed to it. In 
ordinary poetry, if it is found in the thoughts of the poet him- 
self, it is at once a sign of his belonging to the inferior school ; 
if in the thoughts of the characters imagined by him, it is right 
or wrong according to the genuineness of the emotion from 
which it springs ; always, however, implying necessarily some 
degree of weakness in the character. 

Take two most exquisite instances from master hands. The 
Jessy of Shenstone, and the Ellen of Wordsworth, have both 
been betrayed and deserted. Jessy, in the course of her most 
touching complaint, says : 

" If through the garden's flowery tribes I stray, 

"Where bloom the jasmines that could once allure, 
' Hope not to find delight in us,' they say, 
' For we are spotless, Jessy ; we are pure.' " 

Compare with this some of the words of Ellen : 

" ' Ah, why,' said Ellen, sighing to herself, 
' Wliy do not words, and kiss, and solemn pledge, 



372 POKTET. 

A.nd nature, that is kind ia woman's breast, 

And reason, tliat in man is wise and good, 

And fear of Him who is a righteous Judge, — 

Why do not these prevail for human life, 

To keep two hearts together, that began 

Their springtime with one love, and that have need 

Of mutual pity and forgiveness, sweet 

To grant, or be received ; while that poor bird — 

0, come and hear him 1 Thou who hast to me 

Been faithless, hear him ; — though a loijvly creature 

One of God's simple children, that yet know not 

The Universal Parent, lioiv he sings I 

As if he wished tlie firmament of heaven 

Should listen, and give back to him the voice 

Of his triumphant constancy and love. 

The proclamation that he makes, how far 

His darkness doth transcend our fickle light.' " 

The perfection of both these passages, as far as regards truth 
and tendei'ness of imagination in the two poets, is quite insu- 
perable. But, of the two characters imagined, Jessy is weaker 
than Ellen, exactly in so far as something appears to her to be 
in nature which is not. The flowers do not really reproach 
her. God meant them to comfort her, not to taunt her ; they 
would do so if she saw them rightly. 

Ellen, on the other hand, is quite above the slightest erring 
emotion. There is not the barest film of fallacy in aU her 
thoughts. She reasons as calmly as if she did not feel. And, 
although the singing of the bird suggests to her the idea of 
its desiring to be heard in heaven, she does not for an instant 
admit any veracity in the thought. " As if," she says, — " I 
know he means nothing of the kind ; but it does verily seem 
as if." The reader Avill find, by examining the rest of the 
poem, that Ellen's character is throughout consistent in this 
clear though passionate strength. 



MYTHOLOGY. 373 

It then being, I hope, now made clear to the reader in all 
respects that the pathetic fallacy is powerful only so far as it 
is pathetic, feeble so far as it is fallacious, and, therefore, that 
the dominion of Truth is entire, over this, as over every othei 
natural and just state of the human mind, we may go on to 
the subject for the dealing with which this prefatory inquiry 
became necessary ; and why necessary, we shall see forthwith.* 

Very frequently things which appear to us ignoble are merely 
the simplicities of a pure and truthful age. When Juno beats 
Diana about the ears with her oa^ti quiver, for instance, Ave 
start at first, as if Homer could not have believed that they 
were both real goddesses. But what should Juno have done ? 
Killed Diana with a look ? Nay, she neither wished to do so, 
nor could she have done so, by the very faith of Diana's god- 
dess-ship. Diana is as immortal as herself. Frowned Diana 
into submission ? But Diana has come expressly to try con- 
clusions AA-ith her, and will by no means be frowned into sub- 
mission. Wounded her with a celestial lance ? That sounds 
more poetical, but it is in reality partly more savage, and 
partly more absurd, than Homer. More savage, for it makea 

* I cannot quit this subject without giving two more instances, both exqui' 
site, of the pathetic fallacy, which I have just come upon, in Maude : 

" For a great speculation had fail'd ; 
And ever he mutter'd and madden'd, and ever wann'd with despair; 
And out he walk'd, when the wind like a broken worldling wail'd. 
And the flying gold of the ruined woodlands drove thro' the air." 

" There has fallen a splendid tear 

From the passion-flower at the gate. 
The red rose cries, ' She is near, she is near /' 

And the ivhite rose weeps, ' She is late,' 
TTie larkspur listens, ^ I hear, I hear P 

And the lily whispers, ' I wait.^ " 



374 POETRY. 

Juno more cruel, therefore less divine ; and more absurd, for 
it only seems elevated in tone, because we use the word 
" celestial," which means nothing. What sort of a thing is a 
" celestial" lance ? Not a wooden one. Of what then ? Of 
moonbeams, or clouds, or mist. Well, therefore, Diana's 
arrows were of mist too ; and her quiver, and herself, and 
Juno with her lance, and all, vanish into mist. Why 
not have said at once, if that is all you mean, that two 
mists met, and one drove the other back ? That would 
have been rational and intelligible, but not to talk of celes- 
tial lances. Homer had no such misty fancy ; he believed the 
two goddesses Avere there in true bodies, with true weapons, 
on the true earth ; and still I ask what should Juno have done ? 
Not beaten Diana ? No ; for it is un-lady-like. Un-EngUsh- 
lady-like, yes ; but by no means un-Greek-lady-like, nor even 
un-natural-lady-like. If a modern lady does not beat her ser- 
vant or her rival about the ears, it is oftener because she is too 
weak, or too proud, than because she is of purer mind than 
Homer's Juno. She will not strike them ; but she wiU over- 
work the one or slander the other without pity ; and Homer 
would not have thought that one whit more goddess-like than 
striking them with her open hand. 

What, then, was actually the Greek god ? In what way 
were these two ideas of human form, and divine power, credi- 
bly associated in the ancient heart, so as to become a subject 
of true faith, irrespective equally of fable, allegory, supersti- 
tious trust in stone, and demoniacal influence ? 

It seems to me that the Greek had exactly the same instinct- 
ive feeling about the elements that we have ourselves ; that to 
Homer, as much as to Casimir de la Vigne, fire seemed raven- 
ous and pitiless ; to Homer, as much as to Keats, the sea-wave 
appeared wayward or idle, or whatever else it may be to the 
poetical passion. The Grgelv never removed his god out of 



MYTHOLOGY. 375 

nature at all ; never attempted for a moment to contradict his 
instinctive sense that God was everywhere. " The tree is glad," 
said he, " I know it is ; I can cut it down ; no matter, there 
was a nymph in it. The water does sing," said he ; "I can 
dry it up ; but no matter, there was a naiad in it." But in 
thus clearly defining his belief, obseiwe, he threw it entirely 
into a human form, and gave his faith to nothing but the 
image of his own humanity. What sympathy and fellowship 
he had, were always for the spirit in the stream, not for the 
stream ; always for the dryad in the wood, not for the wood. 
Content with this human sympathy, he approached the actual 
waves and woody fibres with no sympathy at all. The spirit 
that ruled them, he received as a plain fact. Them, also, ruled 
and material, he received as plain facts; they, without their 
spirit, were dead enough. A rose was good for scent, and a 
stream for sound and coolness ; for the rest, one was no more 
than leaves, the other no more than water ; he could not make 
anything else of them ; and the divine power which was 
involved in their existence, having been all distilled away by 
him into an independent Flora or Thetis, the poor leaves or 
waves were left, in mere cold corporealness, to make the most 
of their being discernibly red and soft, clear and wet, and un- 
acknowledged in any other power whatsoever. 

Then, observe farther, the Greeks lived in the midst of the 
most beautiful nature, and were as familiar with blue sea, clear 
air, and sweet outlines of mountain, as we are with brick walls, 
black smoke, and level fields. This perfect familiarity rendered 
all such scenes of natural beauty unexciting, if not indifferent 
to them, by lulling and overwearying the imagination as far as 
it was concerned with such things; but there was another 
kind of beauty which they found .[ required effort to obtain, 
and which, when thoroughly obtained, su-nned more glorious 
than any of this wild loveliness — the beautj of the human 



376 POETRY. 

countenance and form. , This, they perceived, could only be 
reached by continual exercise of virtue ; and it was in Heaven's 
sight, and theirs, all the more beautiful because it needed this 
self denial to obtain it. So they set themselves to reach this, 
and having gained it, gave it their principal thoughts, and set 
it off with beautiful dress as best they might. But making 
this their object, they were obliged to pass their lives in sim- 
ple exercise and disciplined employments. Living wholesomely, 
giving themselves no fever fits, either by fasting or over-eating, 
constantly in the open air, and full of animal spirit and physi- 
cal power, they became incapable of every morbid condition 
of mental emotion. Unhappy love, disappointed ambition, 
spiritual despondency, or any other disturbing sensation, had 
little power over the well-braced nerves, and healthy flow of 
the blood ; and what bitterness might yet fasten on them was 
soon boxed or raced out of a boy, and spun or woven out of 
a girl, or danced out of both. They had indeed their sorrows, 
true and deep, but still, more like children's sorrows than ours, 
whether bursting into open cry of pain, or hid with shudder- 
ing under the veil, still passing over the soul as clouds do over 
heaven, not sullying it, not mingling with it ; — darkening it per- 
haps long or utterly, but still not becoming one with it, and for 
the most part passing away in dashing rain of tears, and leaving 
the man unchanged ; in nowise affecting, as our sorrow does, the 
whole tone of his thought and imagination thenceforward. 
How far our melancholy may be deej)er and wider than 
theirs, in its roots and view, and therefore nobler, we shall 
consider presently ; but at all events, they had the advantage 
of us in being entirely free from all those dim and feverish 
sensations which result from unhealthy state of the body. I 
believe that a large amount of the dreamy and sentimental 
sadness, tendency to revei'ie, and general patheticalness of 
modern life results merely from derangement of stomach ; 



TASTE rw LITERATURE. 377 

holding to the Greek life the same relation that the feverish 
night of an adult does to a child's sleep. 

Farther. The human beauty, which, whether in its bodily- 
being or in imagined divinity, had become, for the reasons 
we have seen, the principal object of culture and sympathy 
to these Greeks, was, in its perfection, eminently orderly, 
symmetrical, and tender. Hence, contemplating it constantly 
in this state, they could not but feel a proportionate fear of 
aU that was disorderly, unbalanced, and rugged. Having 
trained their stoutest soldiers into a strength so delicate and 
lovely, that their white flesh, with their blood upon it, should 
look like ivory stained with purple ;* and having always around 
them, in the motion and majesty of this beauty, enough for 
the full employment of their imagination, they shrank with 
dread or hatred from all the ruggedness of lower nature, — 
from the wrinkled forest bark, the jagged hUl-crest, and irre- 
gular, inorganic storm of sky ; looking to these for the most 
part as adverse powers, and taking pleasure only in such por- 
tions of the lower world as were at once conducive to the rest 
and health of the human frame, and in harmony with the laws 
of its gentler beauty. 

I know many persons who have the purest taste in 
literature, and yet false taste in art, and it is a phenomenon 
which puzzles me not a little ; but I have never known any one 
with false taste in books, and true taste in pictures. It is also 
of the greatest importance to you, not only for art's sake, but 
for all kinds of sake, in these days of book deluge, to keep 
out of the salt swamps of literature, and live on a little rocky 
island of your own, T\'ith a spring and a lake in it, pure and 
good. I cannot, of course, suggest the choice of your library 

* Iliad iv. 141. 



378 POETKT. 

to you, every several mind needs different books ; but there 
are some books which we all need, and assuredly, if you read 
Homer,* Plato, ^schylus, Herodotus, Dante,f Shakspeare, and 
Spenser, as much as you ought, you wUl not require wide 
enlargement of shelves to right and left of them for purposes 
of perpetual study. Among modern books, avoid generally 
magazine and review literature. Sometimes it may contain a 
useful abridgement or a wholesome piece of criticism ; but the 
chances are ten to one it will either waste your time or mislead 
you. If yon want to understand any subject whatever, read 
the best book upon it you can hear of; not a review of tl\e 
book. If you don't like the first book you try, seek for another ; 
but do not hope ever to understand the subject without pains, 
by a reviewer's help. Avoid especially that class of literature 
which has a knowing tone ; it is the most poisonous of all. 
Every good book, or piece of book, is full of admiration and 
awe ; it may contain firm assertion, or stern satire, but it never 
sneers coldly, nor asserts haughtily, and it always leads 
you to reverence or love something with your whole heart. 
It is not always easy to distinguish the satire of the venomoua 
race of books from the satire of the noble and pure ones ; but 
in general you may notice that the cold-blooded Crustacean 
and Batrachian books wiU sneer at sentiment ; and the warm- 
blooded, human books, at sin. Then, in general, the more you 
can restrain your serious reading to reflective or lyric poetry, 
history, and natural history, avoiding fiction and the drama, 

* Chapman'a, if not the original. 

•)■ Carey's or Cayley's, if not the original. I do not know which are the best 
translations of Plato. Herodotus and ^schylus can only be read in the origi- 
nal. It may seem strange that I name books like these for "beginners:" but 
all the greatest books contain food for all ages ; and an intelligent and rightly 
bred youth or girl ought to enjoy much, even in Plato, by the time they are 
fifteen or sixteen. 



SUGGESTIONS FOR READING. 379 

the healthier your mind will become. Of modern poetry keep 
to Scott, Wordsworth, Keats, Crabbe, Tennyson, the two 
Bi'ownings, Lowell, Longfellow, and Coventry Patmore, whose 
" Angel in the House" is a most finished piece of writing, and 
the sweetest analysis we possess of quiet modern domestic 
feeling ; while Mrs. Browning's " Aurora Leigh" is, as far as 
I know, the greatest poem which the century has produced in 
any language. Cast Coleridge at once aside, as sickly and 
useless ; and Shelley, as shallow and verbose ; Byron, until 
your taste is fully formed, and you are able to discern the 
magnificence in him from the wrong. Never read bad or com- 
mon poetry, nor write any poetry yourself; there is, perhaps, 
rather too much than too little in the world already. 

Of reflective prose, read chiefly Bacon, Johnson, and Helps. \- 
Carlyle is hardly to be named as a writer for " beginners," 
because his teaching, though to some of us vitally necessary, 
may to others be hurtful. If you understand and like him, 
read him ; if he ofiends you, you are not yet ready for him, 
and perhaps may never be so ; at all events, give him up, as 
you would sea-bathing if you found it hurt you, till you are 
stronger. Of fiction, read Sir Charles Grandison, Scott's 
novels. Miss Edge worth's, and, if you are a young lady, 
Madame de Genlis', the French Miss Edgeworth ; making 
these, I mean, your constant companions. Of .course you must, 
or will, read other books for amusement, once or twice ; but 
you will find that these have an element of perpetuity in them, 
existing in nothing else of their kind; while their peculiar 
quietness and repose of manner will also be of the greatest 
value in teaching you to feel the same characters in art. Read 
little at a time, trying to feel interest in little things, and read- 
ing not so much for the sake of the story as to get acquainted 
with the pleasant people into whose company these writers 
bring you. A common book will often give you ranch amuse- 



380 POETRY. 

ment, but it is only a noble book which wUl give you deal 
friends. Remember also that it is of less imiiortance to you in 
your earlier years, that the books you read should be clever, 
than that they should be right. I do not mean oppressively or 
repulsively instructive; but that the thoughts they express 
should be just, and the feelings they excite generous. It is not 
necessary for you to read the wittiest or the most suggestive 
books : it is better, in general, to hear what is already known, 
and may be simply said. Much of the literature of the 
present day, though good to be read by persons of ripe age, 
has a tendency to agitate rather than confirm, and leaves its 
readers too frequently in a helpless or hopeless indignation, 
the worst possible state into which the mind of youth can bo 
thrown. It may, indeed, become necessary for you, as you 
advance in life, to set your hand to things that need to be 
altered in the world, or apply your heart chiefly to what must 
be pitied in it, or condemned ; but, for a young person, the 
/ safest temper is one of reverence, and the safest place one of 
i obscurity. Certainly at present, and perhaps through all yoiir 
life, your teachers are wisest when they ntake you content in 
quiet virtue, and that literature and art are best for you which 
point out, in common life and familiar things, the objects for 
hopeful labor, and for humble love. 



Jpart 7. 
MORALS J^NID RELIGIOISr, 



Next to Sincerity, remember stUl, 

Thou must resolve upon Integrity. 

God will have all thou hast ; thy mind, thy will, 

Thy thoughts, thy words, thy works. 

George KEBBsnT 



JPart 7. 

MORALS AND RELIGION. 

The Bible is specifically distinguished from all other early 
literature, by its delight in natural imagery; and the deal- 
ings of God with his people are calculated peculiarly to 
awaken this sensibility within them. Out of the monotonous 
valley of Egypt they are instantly taken into the midst of the 
mightiest mountain scenery in the peninsula of Arabia ; and that 
scenery is associated in their minds with the immediate mani- 
festation and presence of the Divine Power ; so that mountains 
for ever afterwards become mvested with a j)eculiar saci'edness 
in their minds ; while their descendants being placed in Avhat was 
then one of the loveliest districts upon the earth, full of glorious 
vegetation, bounded on one side by the sea, on the north by 
" that goodly mountain " Lebanon, on the south and east by 
deserts, whose barrenness enhanced by their contrast the sense 
of the perfection of beauty in their own land, they became, by 
these means, and by the touch of God's own hand upon their 
hearts, sensible to the appeal of natural scenery in a way ia 
which no other people were at the time ; and their literature 
is full of expressions, not only testifying a vivid sense of the 
power of nature over man, but showing that sympathy with 
natural things themselves^ as if they had human souls, which is 
the especial characteristic of true love of the works of God. I 
intended to have insisted on this sympathy at greater length, 
but I found, only two or three days ago, much of what I had 
to say to you anticipated in a little book, unpretending, but 



384 MOKALS AND KELKilON. 

full of interest, " The Lamp and the Lantern," by Dr. James 
Hamilton ; and I will therefore only ask you to consider such 
expressions as that tender and glorious verse in Isaiah, speaking 
of the cedars on the mountains as rejoicing over the fall of the 
king of Assyria : " Yea, the fir-trees rejoice at thee, and the 
cedars of Lebanon, saying. Since thou art gone down to the 
grave, no feller is come up against us." See what sympathy 
there is here, as if with the very hearts of the trees themselves. 
So also in the words of Christ, in his personification of the lilies : 
" They toil not, neither do they spin." Consider such expres- 
sions as, " The sea saw that, and fled. Jordan was driven back. 
The mountains skipped like rams ; and the little hills like 
lambs." Try to find anything in profane wi'iting like this ; and 
note farther that the whole book of Job appears to have been 
chiefly written and placed in the inspired volume m order to 
show the value of natural history, and its power on the human 
heart. I cannot pass by it without pointing out the evidences 
of the beauty of the country that Job inhabited. 

Observe, first, it was an arable country. " The oxen were 
ploughing, and the asses feeding beside th em." It was a pastoral 
country : his substance, besides camels and asses, was 7000 sheep. 
It was a mountain country, fed by streams descending from the 
high snows. " My brethren have dealt deceitfully as a brook, 
and as the stream of brooks they pass away ; which are blackish 
by reason of the ice, and wherein the snow is hid : What time 
they wax warm they vanish : when it is hot they are consumed 
out of their place." Again : " If I wash myself with snow- 
water, and make my hands never so clean." Again : "Drought 
and heat consume the snow waters." It was a rocky country, 
with forests and verdure rooted in the rocks. " His branch 
shooteth forth in his garden ; his roots are wrapped about the 
heap, and seeth the place of stones." Again : " Thou shalt be 
in league with the stones of the field." It was a place visited, 



SYMPATHY WITH NATURAL THINGS. 386 

like the valleys of S^^-itzerland, by convulsions and .alls of 
mountains. " Surely the mountain falling cometh to nought, 
and the rock is removed out of his place." " The waters wear 
the stones : thou washest away the things which grow out of 
the dust of the earth." " He removeth the mountains and 
they know not : he overturneth them m his anger." " He 
putteth forth his hand upon the rock : he overturneth the 
mountains by the roots : he cutteth out rivers among the rocks." 
I have not time to go farther into this ; but you see Job's country 
was one like your own, full of pleasant brooks and rivers, rushing 
among the rocks, and of all other sweet and noble elements 
of landscape. The magnificent allusions to natural scenery 
throughout the book are therefore calculated to touch the heart 
to the end of time. 

Then at the central point of JeA\'ish prosperity, you have the 
first gi'cat naturalist the world ever saw, Solomon ; not permit- 
ted, indeed, to anticipate, in writing, the discoveries of modern 
times, but so gifted as to show us that heavenly wisdom is 
manifested as much in the knowledge of the hyssop that 
springeth out of the wall as in political and philosophical 
speculation. 

The books of the Old Testament, as distinguished from all 
other early writings, are thus prepared for an everlasting 
influence over humanity ; and, finally, Christ himself, setting 
the concluding example to the conduct and thoughts of men, 
spends nearly his whole life in the fields, the mountains, or the 
small country villages of Judea ; and in the very closing scenes 
of his life, will not so much as sleep within the walls of Jerusalem, 
but rests at the little village of Bethphage, walking in the 
morning, and returning in the evening, through the peaceful 
avenues of the mount of Olives, to and from his work of 
teaching in the temple. 

It T^'ould thus naturally follow, both from the general tone 

17 



386 MOBALS AND RELIGION. 

and teaching of the Scriptures, and from the example of our 
Lord himself, that wherever Christianity was preached and 
accepted, there would be an immediate interest awakened in 
the works of God, as seen in the natural world. 

The whole force of education, until very lately, has been 
directed in every possible way to the destruction of the love of 
nature. The only knowledge which has been considered essen- 
tial among us is that of words, and, next after it, of the abstract 
sciences ; while every liking shown by children for simple natural 
history has been either violently checked, (if it took an incoi- 
venient form for the housemaids,) or else scrupulously limited 
to hours of play : so that it has really been impossible for any 
child earnestly to study the Avorks of God but against its con- 
science; and the love of nature has become inherently the 
characteristic of truants and idlers. While also the art of 
drawing, which is of more real importance to the human race 
than that of writing (because people can hardly draw anything 
without being of some use both to themselves and others, and 
can hardly write anything without wasting their own time and 
that of others), — this art of drawing, I say, which on plain and 
stei-n system should be taught to every child, just as writing 
is, — has been so neglected and abused, that there is not one 
man in a thousand, even of its professed teachers, who knows 
its first principles : and thus it needs much ill-fortune or obsti- 
nacy — much neglect on the j^art of his teachers, or rebellion 
on his own — before a boy can get leave to use his eyes or his 
fingers ; so that those who cayi use them are for the most part 
neglected or rebellious lads — runaways and bad scholars — pas- 
sionate, erratic, self-willed, and restive against all forms of 
education ; while your well-behaved and amiable scholars are 
disciplined into blindness and palsy of half their faculties. 
Wherein there is at once a notable groiind for what difference 



LOVE OF NATURE. 387 

we have observed between the lovers of nature and its despis- 
ers ; between the somewhat immoral and unrespectable watch- 
fiihiess of the one, and the moral and respectable blindness of 
the other. 

One more argument remains, and that, I beheve, an unanswer- 
able one. As, by the accident of education, the love of nature 
has been, among us, associated with wilfulness, so, by the 
accident of time, it has been associated with faithlessness. I 
traced, above, the peculiar mode in which this faithlessness was 
indicated ; but I never intended to imply, therefore, that it was 
an invariable concomitant of the love. Because it happens that, 
by various concurrent ojoerations of evil, we have been led, 
according to those words of the Greek poet already quoted, 
" to dethrone the gods, and crown the whirlwind," it is no 
reason that we should forget there was once a time when " the 
Lord answered Job out of the whirhvind." And if we now 
take final and full view of the matter, we shall find that the 
love of nature, wherever it has existed, has been a faithful and 
sacred element of human feeling ; that is to say, supposing all 
circumstances otherwise the same with respect to two mdi\'i- 
duals, the one who loves nature most will be always found to 
have more faith in God than the other. It is intensely difiicult, 
owing to the confusing and counter influences which always 
mingle in the data of the problem, to make this abstraction 
fairly ; but so far as we can do it, so far, I boldly assert, the result 
is constantly the same : the nature-worship will be found to bring 
■with it such a sense of the presence and power of a Great Sjiirit 
as no mere reasoning can either induce or controvert ; and 
where that nature-worship is innocently pursued, — i.e. with 
due respect to other claims on time, feeling, and exertion, and 
associated with the higher principles of religion, — it becomes 
the channel of certain sacked truths, which by no other means 
can be conveyed. / ti-o-t^tA-c-^ 



388 MORALS AND KELIGION. 

This is not a statement which any investigation is needed ta 
prove. It comes to us at once from the highest of all authority, 
The greater number of the words which are recorded m 
Scripture, as directly spoken to men by the lips of the Deity, 
are cither simple revelations of His law, or sj)ecial threatenings, 
commands, and promises relating to sjiecial events. But two 
passages of God's speaking, one in the Old and one in the 
New Testament, possess, it seems to me, a different character 
from any of the rest, having been uttered, the one to effect the 
last necessary change in the mind of a man whose piety was in 
other respects perfect ; and the other, as the first statement to 
all men of the jmnciples of Christianity by Christ Himself — 
I mean the 38th to 41st chapters of the book of Job, and the 
Sermon on the Moimt. Now, the first of these passages is, 
from beginning to end, nothing else than a direction of the 
mind which was to be perfected to humble observance to the 
works of God in nature. And the other consists only in the 
inculcation of ^Aree things : 1st, right conduct; 2nd, looking 
for eternal life ; 3rd, trusting God, through watchfulness of His 
dealings with His creation : and the entire contents of the book 
of Job, and of the Sermon on the Mount, will be found resolv- 
able simply into these three requirements from all men, — that 
they should act^ rightly, hope for heaven, and watch God's 
wonders and work in the earth ; the right conduct being always 
summed up under the three heads o^ justice, mercy, and tmtJi, 
and no mention of any doctrical point whatsoever occurring in 
either piece of divine teaching. 

As far as I can judge of the ways of men, it seems to me that 
the simplest and most necessary truths are always the last 
believed ; and I suppose that well-meaning people in general 
would rather regulate their conduct and creed by almost any 
other portion of Scripture whatsoever, than by that Sermon on 
the Mount which contains the things that Christ thought it first 



MODERN PROGRESS. 3 89 

necessary for all men to understand. Nevertheless, I believe 
the time will soon come for the full force of these two passages 
of Scripture to be accepted. Instead of supposing the love of 
nature necessarily connected with the faithlessness of the age, 
I believe it is connected properly with the benevolence and 
liberty of the age ; that it is precisely the most healthy element 
which distinctively belongs to us ; and that out of it, cultivated 
no longer in levity or ignorance, but in earnestness and as a 
duty, results will spring of an importance at present incon- 
ceivable ; and lights arise, which, for the first time in man's 
history, will reveal to hhn the true nature of his life, the true 
field for his energies, and the true relations between him and 
his Maker. 

I will not endeavor here to trace the various modes in which 
these results are likely to be efiected, for this would involve an 
essay on education, on the uses of natural history, and the 
probable future destiny of nations. Somewhat on these subjects 
I have spoken in other places ; and I hope to find time, and 
proper place, to say more. But one or two observations may 
be made merely to suggest the directions in which the reader 
may follow out the subject for himself 

The great mechanical impulses of the age, of which most of 
us are so proud, are a mere passing fever, half-speculative, 
half-childish. People will discover at last that royal roads to 
anything can no more be laid in iron than they can in dust ; that 
there are, in fact, no royal roads to anyv.-here worth going to ; 
that if there were, it would that instant cease to be worth 
going to, — I mean so far as the things to be obtained are in any 
way estimable in terms o? price. For there are two classes of 
precious things in the Avorld : those that God gives us for 
nothing — snn, air, and life (both mortal life and immortal) ; 
and the secondarily precious things which he gives us for a 
price : these secondarily precious things, worldly wine and milk, 



390 MOKALS AND RELIGION". 

can only be bought for definite money; they never can ba 
cheapened. No cheating nor bargaining will ever get a single 
thing out of nature's " establishment " at half-price. Do Ave 
want to be strong ? — we must work. To be hungry ? — we 
must starve. To be happy ? — we must be kind. To be wise ? 
— we must look and think. No changing of place at a hundred 
miles an hour, nor making of stuffs a thousand yards a minute, 
will make us one whit stronger, happier, or wiser. There was 
always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever 
so slowly ; they will see it no better for going fast. And they 
will at last, and soon too, find out that their grand inventions 
for conquering (as they think) space and time, do, in reality, 
conquer nothing ; for space and time are, in their own essence, 
unconquerable, and besides did not want any sort of conquering ; 
they wanted using. A fool always Avants to shorten space and 
time : a wise man wants to lengthen both. A fool wants to kill 
space and kill time: a wise man, first to gaui them, then to 
animate them. Your railroad, when you come to understand 
it, is only a device for making the Avorld smaller : and as for 
being able to talk from place to place, that is, indeed, well and 
convenient ; but suppose you have, originally, nothing to say.* 
We shall be obliged at last to confess, what Ave should long 
ago have known, that the really precious things are thought 
and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast ; and 
a man, no hai'ra to go slow ; for his glory is not at all in going, 
but in being. 

" Well ; but railroads and telegraphs are so useful for com- 
municating knowledge to savage nations." Yes, if you have 
any to give them. If you knoAV nothing hut railroads, and 
can communicate nothing but aqueous vapor and gunpowder, 

* " The ligbt-outspeeding telegraph 

Bears nothing on its beam." Emerson. 



MODERN PKOGEESS. 391 

— what then ? But if you have any other tlnug than those to 
give, then the raih'oad is of use only because it communicates 
that other thing ; and the question is — what that other thing 
may be. Is it religion ? I believe if we had really wanted tc 
communicate that, we could have done it in less than 1800 
years, without steam. Most of the good religious communica- 
tion that I remember has been done on foot ; and it cannot be 
easily done faster than at foot pace. Is it science? But 
what science — of motion, meat, and medicine ? "Well ; when 
you have moved your savage, and dressed your savage, fed 
him with white bread, and shown him how to set a limb, — ■ 
Avhat next ? Follow out that question. Suppose every obsta- 
cle overcome ; give your savage every advantage of civilization 
to the full ; suppose that you have put the red Indian in tight 
shoes ; taught the Chinese how to make Wedgwood's w^are, 
and to paint it with colors that will rub off; and persuaded 
all Hindoo women that it is more pious to torment their hus- 
bands into graves than to burn themselves at the burial, — 
what next ? Gradually, thinking on from pomt to point, Ave 
shall come to perceive that all true happiness and nobleness 
are near us, and yet neglected by us; and that till we have 
learned how to be happy and noble, we have not much to tell, 
even to Red Indians. The delights of horse-racing and hunt- 
ing, of assemblies in the night instead of the day, of costly and 
wearisome music, of costly and burdensome dress, of chagrined 
contention for place or power, or wealth, or the eyes of the 
multitude ; and all the endless occupation without pur2:)ose, 
and idleness Avithout rest, of our Amlgar world, are not, it 
seems to me, enjoyments Ave need be ambitious to communi- 
cate. And all real and Avholesome enjoyments possible to man 
have been just as possible to him, since first he Avas made of 
the earth, as they are noAv; and they are possible to him 
chiefly in })eace. To Avatch the corn groAV, and the blossoms 



392 MORALS AND RELIGION. 

set ; to draw hard breath over ploughshare or spade ; to read, 
to thhik, to love, to hope, to pray, — these are the things that 
make men haj)py ; they have always had the power of doing 
these, they never will have power to do more. The world's 
prosperity or adversity depends upon our knowing and teach- 
ing these few things : but upon iron, or glass, or electricity, or 
steam, in no wise. 

And I am Utopian and enthusiastic enough to believe, that 
the time will come when the world will discover this. It has 
now made its experiments in every jDossible direction but the 
right one ; and it seems that it must, at last, try the right one, 
in a mathematical necessity. It has tried fighting, and preach- 
mg, and fasting, buying and selling, pomp and parsimony, 
pride and humiliation, — every possible manner of existence in 
which it could conjecture there was any happiness or dignity; 
and all the whilp, as it bought, sold, and fought, and fasted, 
and wearied itself with policies, and ambitions, and self-denials, 
God had placed its real happiness in the keeping of the little 
mosses of the wayside, and of the clouds of the firmament. 
Now and then a weary king, or a tormented slave, found out 
where the true kingdoms of the world were, and possessed 
himself, in a furrow or two of garden ground, of a truly infinite 
dominion. But the world would not believe their report, and 
went on trampling down the mosses, and forgetting the clouds, 
and seeking happiness in its own way, until, at last, blundering 
and late, came natural science ; and in natural science not only 
the observation of things, but the finding out of new uses for 
them. Of course the world, havuig a choice left to it, went 
wrong as usual, and thought that these mere material usea 
were to be the sources of its happiness. It got the clouds 
packed into iron cylinders, and made it carry its wise self at 
their own cloud pace. It got weavable fibres out of the 
mosses, and made clothes for itself, cheap and fine, — here wasf 



LANDSCAPE-PAINTING AND NATURAL SCIENCE. 395 

happiness at last. To go as fast as the clouds, and manufacture 
everytlung out of anything, — hei'e was paradise indeed ! 

And now, when, in a Httle while, it is unparadised again, if 
there were any other mistake that the world could make, it 
would of course make it. But I see not that there is any 
other ; and, standing fairly at its wits' end, having found that 
going fast, when it is used to it, is no more paradisiacal than 
going slow ; and that all the prints and cottons in Manchester 
cannot make it comfortable m its mind, I do verily believe it 
wiU come, finally, to understand that God paints the clouds 
and shapes the moss-fibres, that men may be happy in seeing 
Him at His work, and that in resting quietly beside Him, and 
watching His working, and — accorduig to the power He has 
communicated to ourselves, and the guidance He grants, — in 
carrying out His purposes of peace and charity among all His 
creatures, are the only real happinesses that ever were, or will 
be, possible to mankind. 

How far art is capable of helping us in such happiness we 
hardly yet know ; but I hope to be able, in the subsequent 
parts of this work, to give some data for arriving at a conclu- 
sion in the matter. Enough has been advanced to relieve the 
reader from any lurking suspicion of unworthiness in our 
subject, and to induce him to take interest in the mind and 
work of the great painter who has headed the landscape 
school among us. What further considerations may, within 
any reasonable limits, be put before him, respecting the cfiect 
of natural scenery on the human heart, I sviW introduce in 
their proper places either as w^e examine, under Turner's 
guidance, the different classes of scenery, or at the close of the 
whole work; and therefore I have only one point more to 
notice here, namely, the exact relation between landscape- 
painting and natural science, properly so called. 

For it may be thought that I have rashly assumed that the 

n* 



394 MOKALS AND KELIGION. 

Scriptural authorities above quoted apply to that partly super 
ficial view of nature whicli is taken by tlie landscaije-painter, 
instead of to the accurate view taken by the man of science. 
So far from there being rashness in such an assumption, the 
whole language, both of the book of Job and the Sei'mon on 
the Mount, gives precisely the view of nature which is taken 
by the uninvestigating affection of a humble, but powerful 
mind. There is no dissection of muscles or counting of ele- 
ments, but the boldest and broadest glance at the apparent 
facts, and the most magnificent metaphor in exj)ressing them. 
" His eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. In his neck 
remaineth strength, and sorrow is turned into joy before him." 
And in the often repeated, never obeyed, command, " Consider 
the lilies of the field," observe there is precisely the delicate 
attribution of life which we have seen to be the characteristic 
of the modern view of landscape, — " They toil not." There 
is no science, or hint of science ; no counting of petals, nor 
disj)lay of provisions for sustenance : nothing but the expres- 
sion of sympathy, at once the most childish, and the most pro- 
found,—" They toil not." 

And we see in this, therefore, that the instinct which leads 
us thus to atti'ibute life to the lowest forms of organic nature, 
does not necessarily spring from faithlessness, nor the deducing 
a moral out of them from an irregular and languid conscien- 
tiousness. In tliis, as in almost all things connected with 
moral discipline, the same results may follow from contrary 
causes ; and as there are a good and evil contentment, a good 
and evil discontent, a good and evil care, fear, ambition, and 
so on, there are also good and evil forms of this sympathy with 
nature, and disposition to moralize over it. In general, active 
men, of strong sense and stern principle, do not care to see 
anything in a leaf, but vegetable tissue, and are so well con- 
vincetl of useful moral truth, that it does not strike them as a 



SCIENTIFIC ruiisurrs. 395 

new or notable thing when they find it in any way symbolized 
by material nature ; hence there is a strong presumption, when 
first we perceive a tendency in any one to regard trees as liv- 
ing, and enunciate moral aphorisms over every pebble they 
stumble against, that such tendency proceeds from a morbid 
temperament, like Shelley's, or an inconstant one, like Jaques's, 
But when the active life is nobly fulfilled, and the mind is then 
raised beyond it into clear and calm beholding of the world 
around us, the same tendency again manifests itself in the 
most sacred way : the simplest forms of nature are strangely 
animated by the sense of the Divine presence ; the trees and 
flowers seem aU, in a sort, children of God ; and we ourselves, 
their fellows, made out of the same dust, and greater than 
they only in having a greater portion of the Divine power 
exerted on our frame, and all the common uses and palpably 
visible forms of tilings, become subordinate in our muids to 
their inner glory, — to the mysterious voices in which they talk 
to us about God, and the changeful and typical aspects by 
which they witness to us of holy truth, and fill us with obedi- 
ent, joyful, and thankful emotion. 

It is in raising us from the first state of inactive reverie to 
the second of useful thought, that scientific pursuits are to be 
chiefly praised. But in restraining us at this second stage, 
and checking the impulses towards liigher contemplation, they 
are to be feared or blamed. They may in certain minds be 
consistent with such contemplation ; but only by an efibrt : in 
their nature they are always adverse to it, having a tendency 
to chill and subdue the feelings, and to resolve all things into 
atoms and numbers. For most men, an ignorant enjoyment 
is better than an informed one ; it is better to conceive the \^ 
sky as a blue dome than a dark cavity, and the cloud as a ^ 
golden throne than a sleety mist. I much question whether / 
any one who knows o^^tics, however religious he may be, can 



396 MOKALS AND KELIGION. 

feel in equal degree the pleasure or reverence which an unlet- 
tered peasant may feel at the sight of a rainbow. And it is 
mercifully thus ordained, since the law of life, for a finite being, 
with respect to the works of an infinite one, must be always 
an infinite ignorance. We cannot fathom the mystery of a 
single flower, nor is it intended that we should ; but that the 
pursuit of science should constantly be stayed by the love of 
beauty, and accuracy of knowledge by tenderness of emotion. 
Nor is it even just to speak of the love of beauty as in aU 
respects unscientific ; for there is a science of the aspects of 
things as well as of their nature ; and it is as much a fact to 
be noted in their constitution, that they produce such and 
such an efiect upon the eye or heart (as, for instance, that mi- 
nor scales of sound cause melancholy), as that they are made 
up of certain atoms or vibrations of matter. 

We are too much in the habit of looking at falsehood in its 
darkest associations, and through the color of its worst pur- 
poses. That indignation which we profess to feel at deceit 
absolute, is indeed only at deceit malicious. We resent 
calumny, hypocrisy, and treachery, because they harm us, not 
because they are untrue. Take the detraction and the mischief 
from the untruth, and we are little offended by it ; turn it into 
praise, and we may be pleased with it. And yet it is not 
calumny nor treachery that does the most harm in the world ; 
they are continually crushed, and are felt only in being con- 
quered. But it is the glistening and softly spoken Ue ; the 
amiable fallacy ; the patriotic lie of the historian, the provident 
lie of the politician, the zealous lie of the partizan, the merci- 
ful lie of the friend, and the careless lie of each man to him- 
self, that cast that black mystery over humanity, through 
which any man who pierces, we thank as we would thank any 
one who dug a well in a desert ; happy in that the thii'st for 



THE PUNISUMEXT OF SIX 397. 

truth still remains with us, even when we have wilfully left 
the fountains of it. 

It would be well if moralists less frequently confused the 
greatness of a sin with its impardonahleness. The two cha 
racters are altogether distinct. The greatness of a fault 
depends partly on the nature of the person against whom it 
is committed, partly upon the extent of its consequences. Its 
pardonableness depends, humanly speaking^ on the degree of 
temptation to it. One class of circumstances determines the 
weight of the attaching punishment, the other, the claim to 
the remission of punishment ; and since it is not easy for men 
to estimate the relative weight, nor j^ossible for them to know 
the relative consequences of crime, it is usually wise in them 
to quit the care of such wise adjustments, and to look on the 
other and clearer condition of culpability, esteeming those 
faults greatest which are committed under least temptation. 
I do not mean to diminish the blame of the mjurious and 
malicious sin, of the selfish and deliberate falsity ; yet it seems 
to me that the shortest way to check the darker forms of 
deceit is to set more scrupulous watch against those which 
have mingled, unregarded and unchastised, with the current 
of our life. Do not let us lie at all. Do not think of one 
falsity as harmless, and another as slight, and another as unin- 
tended. Cast them all aside ; they may be light and acciden- 
tal, but they are an ugly soot from the smoke of the pit, for 
all that \ and it is better that our hearts should be kept clear 
of them, without over-care as to which is the largest or 
blackest. Speaking truth is like writing fair, and comes only 
by practice ; it is less a matter of will than of habit ; and I 
doubt if any occasion can be trivial which permits the prac- 
tice and foi'mation of such a habit. To speak and act truth 
with constancy and precision is nearly as difficult, and perhaps 
as meritorious, as to speak it under intimidation or penalty ; 



398 MORALS AND RELIGION. 

and it is a strange thought how many men there are, as I trusty 
who would hold it at the cost of fortune or life, for one who 
could hold it at the cost of a little daily trouble. 

And seeing that of all sin there is, perhaps, no one more 
flatly opposite to the Almighty, no one more "M^anting the 
good of virtue and of being," than this of lying, it is surely a 
strange insolence to fall into the foulness of it on light or no 
temptation, and surely becoming an honorable man to resolve 
that, whatever fallacies the necessary course of his life may 
compel him to bear or to believe, none shall disturb the serenity 
of his voluntary actions, nor diminish the reality of his chosen 
delights. 

On the whole, these are much sadder ages than the early 
ones ; not sadder in a noble and deep way, but in a dim, wearied 
way, — the way of ennui, and jaded intellect, and uncomfortable- 
ness of soul and body. The Middle Ages had their wars and 
agonies, but also intense delights. Their gold was dashed with 
blood ; but ours is sprinkled with dust. Their life was inter- 
woven with white and purple ; ours is one seamless stuff of 
brown. Not that we are without apparent festivity, but festivity 
more or less forced, mistaken, embittered, incomplete — not of 
the heart. How wonderfully, since Shakspere's time, have we 
lost the power of laughing at bad jests ! The very finish of 
our wit belies our gaiety. 

The profoundest reason of this darkness of heart is, I believe, 
our want of faith. There never yet Avas a generation of men 
(savage or civilized) who, taken as a body, so wofully fulfilled 
the words, " having no hope, and without God in the world," 
as the present civilized European race. A Red Indian or 
Otaheitan savage has more sense of a Divine existence round 
him, or government over him, than the plurality of refined 
Londoners and Parisians; and those among us who may ii: 



WANT OF FAITH. 899 

some sense be sai«l to believe, are divided almost without | 
exception into tAvo broad classes, Romanist and Pmitan ; who, 
but for the interference of the unbelieving portions of society, 
would, either of them, reduce the other sect as speedily as 
possible to ashes ; the Romanist having always done so when- 
evei" he could, from the beginning of their sejiaration, and the 
Puritan at this time holding himself in complacent expectation 
of the destruction of Rome by volcanic fire. Such division as 
this between persons nominally of one religion, that is to say, 
believing in the same God, and the same Revelation, cannot 
but become a stumbling-block of the gravest kind to all thought- 
ful and far-sighted men, — a stumbling-block which they can 
only surmount under the most favorable circumstances of early 
education. Hence, nearly all our powerful men in this age of 
the world are unbelievers ; the best of them in doubt and 
misery ; the worst in reckless defiance ; the plurality in plodding 
hesitation, doing, as well as they can, what practical work lies 
ready to their hands. Most of our scientific men are in this last 
class ; our i)opular authors either set themselves definitely 
against all religious form, pleading for simply truth and bene- 
volence (Thackeray, Dickens), or give themselves up to bitter 
and fruitless statement of facts (De Balzac), or surface-jjainting 
(Scott), or careless blasphemy, sad or smiling (Byron, Beranger). 
Our earnest poets, and deepest thinkers, are doubtful and indig- 
nant (Tennyson, Carlyle) ; one or two, anchored, indeed, but 
anxious, or weeping (Wordsworth, Mi's. Browning) ; and 
of these two, the first is not so sure of his anchor, but 
that now and then it drags with him, even to make him cry 
out, — 

" Great God, I had rather be 
A Pagan suckled in some creed outworn : 

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn." 



400 MOEALS AND EELIGION. 

The absence of care for personal beauty, wbicli is another 
great characteristic of the age, adds to this feeUng in a twofold 
way : first, by turning all reverent thoughts away from human 
nature ; and making us think of men as ridiculous or ugly 
creatures, getting through the world as well as they can, and 
spoiling it in doing so; not ruling it in a kingly way and 
crowning all its loveliness. In the Middle Ages hardly anything 
but vice could be caricatured, because vii-tue was always visibly 
and jiersonally noble ; now virtue itself is apt to inhabit such 
poor human bodies, that no aspect of it is invulnerable to jest ; 
and for all fairness we have to seek to the flowers, for all 
sublimity, to the hUls. 

The same want of care operates, in another way, by lowering 
the standard of health, increasing the susceptibility to nervoiis 
or sentimental impression?, and thus adding to the other powers 
of nature over us whatever charm may be felt in her fostering 
the melancholy fancies of brooding idleness. 

That is to everything created, pre-eminently useful, which 
enables it rightly and fully to perform the functions appointed 
to it by its Creator. Therefore, that we may determine what 
is chiefly useful to man, it is necessary first to determine the 
use of man himself. 

Man's use and function is to be the witness of the glory of 
God, and to advance that glory by his reasonable obedience 
and resultant happiness. 

Whatever enables us to fulfil this function, is in the pure and 
first sense of the w^ord useful to us ; pre-eminently, therefore, 
whatever sets the glory of God more brightly before us. But 
tlungs that only help us to exist, are in a secondary and mean 
sense, useful, or rather, if they be looked for alone, they are 
useless and worse ; for it would be better that Ave should not 
exist, than that we should guiltily disappoint the purposes of 
existence. 



man's use and function. 401 

And yet people speak in this working age, when they speak 
flom their hearts, as if houses, and lands, and food, and raiment 
were alone useful, and as if sight, thought, and admiration, were 
all profitless, so that men insolently caU themselves Utilitarians, 
who would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their 
race into vegetables ; men who think, as far as such can be said 
to think, that the meat is more than the life, and the I'aunent 
than the body, who look to the earth as a stable, and to its fruit 
as fodder ; vmedressers and husbandmen, who love the corn they 
grhid, and the grapes they crush, better than the gardens of 
the angels upon the slopes of Eden ; hewers of wood and drawers 
of water, who think that the wood they hew and the water they 
draw, are better than the pine forests that cover the mountains 
like the shadow of God, and than the great rivers that move 
like eternity. 

It seems to me that much of what is great, and to all men 
beneficial, has been Avrouglit by those who neither intended 
nor knew the good they did, and that many mighty harmonies 
have been discoursed by mstruments that had been dumb or 
discordant, but that God knew their stops. The Spirit of 
Prophecy consisted with the avarice of Balaam, and the dis- 
obedience of Saul. Could we spare from its page that parable, 
which he said, who saw the vision of the Almighty, falling into 
a trance, but having his eyes open, though we know that the 
sword of his punishment was then sharp in its sheath beneath 
him in the plains of Moab ? or shall Ave not lament with David 
over the shield cast away on the GUboa mountains, of him 
to whom God gave another heart that day, when he turned hia 
back to go from Samuel ? It is not our part to look hardly, 
nor to look always, to the character or the deeds of men, but 
to accept from all of them, and to hold fast that which we can 
prove good, and feel to be ordained for us. 



402 MOEALS AND RELIGION. 

It is not possible for a Christian man to walk across so mucn 
as a rood of the natural earth, with ramd unagitated and rightly 
poised, without receiving strength and hope from some stone, 
flower, leaf, or sound, nor without a sense of a dew falling upon 
him out of the sky; though, I say, this falsity is not wholly and 
in terms admitted, yet it seems to be partly and practically so 
in much of the doing and teaching even of holy men, who in 
the recommending of the love of God to us, refer but seldom 
to those things in which it is most abundantly and immediately 
shown ; though they insist much on his giving of bread, and 
raiment, and health, (which he gives to all inferior creatures,) 
they require us not to thank him for that glory of his works 
which he has j)ermitted us alone to perceive : they tell us often 
to meditate in the closet, but they send us not, like Isaac, into 
the fields at even; they dwell on the duty of self-denial, but they 
exhibit not the duty of delight. Now there are reasons for this, 
manifold in the toil and warfare of an earnest mind, which, in 
its efforts at the raising of men from utter loss and misery, has 
often but little time or disposition to take heed of anything 
more than the bare life, and of those so occujiied it is not for 
us to judge ; but I think, that, of the weaknesses, distresses, 
vanities, schisms, and sins, which often even in the holiest men, 
diminish their usefulness, and mar their happiness, there would 
be fewer, if in their struggle with nature fallen, they sought for 
more aid from nature undestroyed. It seems to me that the 
real sources of bluntness in the feelmgs towards the splendor 
of the grass and glory of the flower, are less to be found 
in ardor of occupation, in seriousness of compassion, or heaven- 
liness of desire, than in the turning of the eye at intervals of 
rest too selfishly within ; the want of power to shake off the 
anxieties of actual and near interest, and to leave results in 
God's hands ; the scorn of all that does not seem immediately 



MAII'S USE AND FTTSTCTIOIT. 403 

apt for our purposes, or open to our understanding, and perhaps 
something of pride, Avhich desires rather to investigate than; 
to feel. I believe that the root of almost every schism and 
heresy from which the Christian church has ever suffered, has 
been the effort of men to earn, rather than to receive, their 
salvation. 

Deep though the causes of thankfulness must be to every 
people at peace with others and at unity with itself, there are 
causes of fear also, a fear greater than of sword and sedition ; 
that dependence on God may be forgotten because the bread 
is given and the water is sure ; that gi-atitude to Him may cease 
because his constancy of protection has taken the semblance of 
a natural law ; that heavenly hope may grow faint amid the full 
fruition of the world ; that selfishness may take place of unde- 
manded devotion, compassion be lost in vain-glory, and love 
in dissimulation ; that enervation may succeed to strength, 
apathy to patience, and noise of jesting words and foulness 
of dark thoughts to the earnast purity of the girded loins and 
the burning lamp. About the river of human life there is a ' 
^wintry wind, though a heavenly sunshine ; the iris colors its 
agitation ; the frost fixes upon its repose ! Let us beware that 
our rest become not the rest of stones, which so long as they 
are torrent-tossed and thunder-stricken, maintain their majesty, 
but when the stream is silent, and the storm passed, suffer the 
grass to cover them and the lichen to feed on them, and are 
ploughed down into dust. 

There is no action so slight, nor so mean, but it may be done 
to a great purpose, and ennobled therefor; nor is any pur- 
pose so great but that slight actions may help it, and may be 
so done as to help it much, most esjDecially that chief of all 
purposes, the pleasing of God. Hence George Hei-bert — 



404 , MORALS AND RELIGION. 

" A servant with this clause 
Makes drudgery divine ; 
"Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, 
Makes that and the action fine." 

We treat God mth irreverence by banishing Him fi'om cur 
thoughts, not by referring to liis will on shght occasions. His 
is not the finite authority or intelligence which cannot be 
troubled with small things. There is nothing so small but 
that we may honor God by asking His guidance of it, or msult 
Him by taking it into our own hands ; and what is true of the 
Deity is equally true of His Revelation. We use it most 
reverently when most habitually ; our insolence is in ever act- 
ing without reference to it ; our true honoring of it is in its 
universal application. 

There is not any part of our feeling or nature, nor can there 
be through eternity, which shall not be in some way influenced 
and afiected by the fall, and that not in any way of degrada- 
tion, for the renewing in the divinity of Christ is a nobler con- 
dition than ever that of Paradise, and yet throughout eternity 
it must imply and refer to the disobedience, and the corrupt 
state of sin and death, and the suifering of Christ himself, 
which can we conceive of any redeemed soul as for an instant 
forgetting, or as remembering without sorrow ? Neither are 
the alternations of joy and such sorrow as by us is inconceiva- 
ble, being only as it were a softne*s_and silence in the pulse of 
an infinite felicity, inconsistent with the state even of the un- 
fallen, for the angels who rejoice over repentance cannot but 
feci an uncomprehended pain as they try and try again in vam, 
whether they may not warm hard hearts with the brooding of 
their kind wings. 

/ God appoints to every one of his ci'eatures a separate mis- 



HONOR FOR THE DEAD, GRATITUDE FOR THE LIVING. 405 

sion, and if they discharge it honorably, if they quit themselves 
like men, and faithfully follow that light which is in them, 
withdrawing from it all cold and quenchless influence, there 
will assuredly come of it such burning as, according to its 
appointed mode and measure, shall shine before men, and be 
of service constant and holy. Degrees infinite of lustre there 
must always be, but the weakest among us has a gift, however 
seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to him, and which, worthily 
used, will be a gift also to his race for ever-^" Fool not," says 
George Herbert, 

" For all may have, 
If they dare choose, a glorious life or grave." 

Let us not forget, that if honor be for the dead, gratitude 
can only be for the living. He who has once stood beside the 
grave, to look back upon the companionship which has been 
for ever closed, feeling how impotent there are the Avild love, 
or the keen sorrow, to give one instant's pleasure to the pulse- 
less heart, or atone in the lowest measure to the departed 
spirit for the hour oi -mkindness, will scarcely, for the future, 
incur that debt to th< heart, which can only be discharged to 
the dust. But the lesson which men receive as individuals, 
they do not learn as nations. Again and again they have seen 
their noblest descend into the grave, and have thought it 
enough to garland the tombstone when they had not crowned 
the brow, and to pay the honor to the ashes, which they had 
denied to the spirit. Let it not displease them that they are 
bidden, amid the tumult and the dazzle of their busy life, tc 
listen to the few voices, and watch for the few lamps, which 
God has toned and lighted to charm and to guide them, that 
they may not learn their sweetness by their silence, nor their 
light by their decay. 

.M 



406 MORALS AND RELIGION. 

Aristotle lias subtly noted that " Ave call not men intemj^erate 
so much with respect to the scents of roses or herb-perfumes 
as of ointments and of condiments." For the fact is, that of 
scents artificially prepared the extreme desire is intemperance, 
but of natural and God-given scents, which take their part in 
the harmony and pleasantness of creation, there can hardly 
be intemperance; not that there is any absolute diflerence 
betsveen the two kinds, but that these are likely to be received 
with gratitude and joyfulness rather than those, so that we 
despise the seeking of essences and unguents, but not the 
sowing of violets along our garden banks. But all things may 
be elevated by aifection, as the spikenard of Mary, and in the 
Song of Solomon, the myrrh upon the handles of the lock, and 
that of Isaac concerning his son. And the general law for all 
these pleasures is, that when sought in the abstract and 
ardently, they are foul things, but Avhen received with thank- 
fulness and with reference to God's glory, they become theo- 
retic (the exulting, reverent, and grateful perception of 
pleasantness, I call theoria) ; and so I can find something divine 
in the sweetness of wild fruits, as well as in the pleasantness 
of the piire air, and the tenderness of its natural perfumes 
that come and go as they list. 

The pleasures of sight and hearing are given as gifts. They 
answer not any purposes of mere existence, for the distinction 
of all that is useful or dangerous to us might be made, and 
often is made, by the eye, without its receiving the slightest 
pleasure of sight. "We might have learned to distinguish fruits 
and grain from flowers, without having any superior pleasure 
in the aspect of the latter. And the ear might have learned 
to distinguish the sounds that communicate ideas, or to recog- 
nize intimations of elemental danger, without perceiving either 
music in the voice, or majesty in the thunder. And as these 
pleasures have no function to perform, so there is nn limit to 



TRADESMEN". 40 "7 

their continuance in the accomplishment of their ei d, for iliey 
are an end in themselves^ and so may be perpetual with all of 
us — being in no way destructive, but rather increasing in 
exquisiteness by repetition. 

In whatever is an object of life, in whatever may be infinitely 
and for itself desired, we may be sure there is something o^ 
divine, for God will not make anything an object of life to hi& 
creatures which does not point to, or partake of, Himself. 

I believe one of the worst symptoms of modern society to 
be, its notion of great inferiority, and ungentlemanhness, as 
necessarily belonging to the character of a tradesman, I be- 
lieve tradesmen may be, ought to be — often are, more gentle- 
men than idle and useless people : and I believe that art may 
do noble work by recording in the hall of each trade, the ser- 
vices which men belonging to that trade have done for their 
country, both preserving the portraits, and recording the im- 
portant incidents in the lives, of those who have made great 
advances in commerce and civilization. We are stewards or 
ministers of whatever talents are entrusted to us. Is it not a 
strange thing, that while we more or less accept the meaning 
of that saying, so long as it is considered metaphorical, ^ve 
never accept its meaning in its own terms ? You know the 
lesson is given us under the form of a story about money. 
Money was given to the servants to make use of: the unpro- 
fitable servant dug in the earth, and hid his Lord's money. 
Well, we, in our poetical and spiritual application of this, say, 
that of course money doesn't mean money, it means wit, it 
means intellect, it means influence in high quarters, it means 
everything in the world except itself And do not you see 
Avhat a pretty and pleasant come-oflT there is for most of us, in 
this spiritual application ? Of course, if we had wit, we would 



408 MOr.ALS AND EELIGION. 

use it for the good of our fellow-creatures. But we haven't 
wit. Of course, if we had influence with the bishops, we 
would use it for the good of the Church ; but we haven't any 
influence with the bishops. Of course, if we had political 
power, we would use it for the good of the nation ; but we 
have no i^olitical power ; we have no talents entrusted to us 
of any sort or kmd. It is true we have a little money, but the 
parable can't possibly mean anything so vulgar as money; 
our money's our own. 

I believe, if you think seriously of this matter, you will feel 
that the first and most literal application is just as necessary a 
one as any other — that the story does very specially mean 
what it says — plain money ; and that the reason we don't at 
once believe it does so, is a sort of tacit idea that while thought, 
wit, and intellect, and all power of birth and position, are 
indeed given to us, and, therefore, to be laid out for the 
Giver, — our wealth has not been given to us ; but we have 
worked for it, and have a right to spend it as we choose. I 
think you will find that is the real substance of our understand- 
ing in this matter. Beauty, we say, is given by God — it is a 
talent ; strength is given by God — it is a talent ; position is 
given by God — it is a talent ; but money is proper wages for 
our day's work — it is not a talent, it is a due. We may justly 
spend it on ourselves, if we have worked for it. 

And there would be some shadow of excuse for this, were it 
not that the very power of making the money is itself only 
one of the applications of that intellect or strength which we 
confess to be talents. Why is one man richer than another ? 
Because he is more industrious, more persevering, and more 
sagacious. Well, who made him more persevering and more 
sagacious than others ? That power of endurance, that 
quickness of apprehension, that calmness of judgment, which 
enable him to seize the opportunities that others lose, and per- 



THE SPIBIT OF TRADE. 409 

sist in the lines of conduct in which others fail — are these not 
talent ? — are they not in the present state of the world, 
among the most distinguished and influential of mental gifts ? 
And is it not wonderful, that while we should be utterly- 
ashamed to use a superiority of body, in order to thrust our 
weaker companions aside from some place of advantage, we 
unhesitatingly use our superiorities of mind to thrust them 
back from whatever good that strength of mind can attain. 
You would be indignant if you saw a strong man walk into a 
theatre or a lecture-room, and calmly choosing the best place, 
take his feeble neighbor by the shoulder, and tuni him out 
of it into the back seats, or the street. You would be equally 
indignant if you saw a stout fellow thrust himself up to a 
table where some hungry children were being fed, and reach 
his arm over their heads and take their bread from them. 
But you are not the least indignant if when a man has stout- 
ness of thought and swiftiness of capacity, and, instead of being 
long-armed only, has the much greater gift of being long- 
headed — you think it perfectly just that he should use his 
intellect to take the bread out of the mouths of all the other 
men in the town who are of the same trade with hira ; or use 
his breadth and sweep of sight to gather some branch of the 
commerce of the country into one great cobweb, of which he 
is himself to be the central spider, making every thread vibrate 
with the points of his claws, and commanding every avenue 
with the fleets of his eyes. You see no injustice in this. 

But there is injustice; and, let us trust, one of whicli 
honorable men Avill at no very distant period disdain to be 
guilty. In some degree, however, it is indeed not unjust ; in 
some degree it is necessary and intended. It is assuredly just 
that idleness should be surpassed by energy ; that the voidest 
influence should be possessed by those who are best able to 
'wield it ; and that a wise man, at the end of his career, should 

18 



410 MOKALS AND RELIGION. 

be better off than a fool. But for that reason, is the fcol I*: 
be wretched, utterly crushed down, and left in all the suffer 
ing which his conduct and capacity naturally inflict ? — N'ot so. 
What do you suppose fools were made for ? That you might 
tread upon them, and starve them, and get the better of them 
in every possible way ? By no means. They were made that 
wise people might take care of them. That is the true and 
plain fact concerning the relations of every strong and wise 
man to the world about him. He has his strength given him, 
not that he may crush the weak, but that he may support and 
guide them. In his own household he is to be the guide ard 
the support of his children ; out of his household he is still vO 
be the father, that is, the guide and support of the weak and 
the poor; not merely of the meritoriously weak and the inno- 
cently poor, but of the guiltily and punishably poor ; of the 
men who ought to have known bettei* — of the poor who ought 
to be ashamed of themselves. It is nothing to give pension 
and cottage to the widow who has lost her son ; it is notliing 
to give food and medicine to the workman who has broken 
his arm, or the decrepit woman wasting in sickness. But it 
is something to use your time and strength to war with the 
waywardness and thoughtlessness of mankind ; to keep the 
erring workman in your service till you have made hiin an 
unerring one ; and to direct your fullow-merchant to tlie 
oj)portunity which his duhiess would have lost. This is 
much ; but it is yet more, when you have fully achieved the 
superiority which is due to you, and acquired the wealth which 
is the fitting reward of your sagacity, if you solemnly accept 
the responsibility of it, as it is the helm and guide of labor 
far and near. For you who have it in your hands, are in 
reality the pilots of the power and effort of the State. It is 
entrusted to you as an autliority to be used for good or e\i], 
just as completely as kingly authority Avas ever given to a 



RIGHT USE OF WEALTH. 411 

pnnce, or military command to a captain. And, according tc 
the quantity of it tlaat you have m your hands, you are the 
arbiters of the will and work of Enghxnd ; and the whole issue, 
whether the work of the State shall suffice for the State or 
not, depends upon you. You may stretch out your sceptre 
over the heads of the English laborers, and say to them, as 
they stoop to its waving, " Subdue this obstacle that has 
baffled our fathers, put away this plague that consumes our 
children ; water these dry places, plough these desert ones, 
carry this food to those who are in hunger ; carry this light to 
those w^ho are m darkness ; carry this life to those who are 
in death ;" or on the other side you may say to her labor- 
ers : " Here am I ; this power is in my hand ; come, build a 
mound here for me to be throned upon, high and wide ; 
come, make crowns for my head, that men may see them 
shine from far away ; come, weave tapestries for my feet, 
that I may tread softly on the silk and j)urple ; come, dance 
before me, that I may be gay ; and sing sweetly to me, that I 
may shimber ; so shall I live in joy and die in honor." And 
better than such an honorable death, it were lliat the day 
had perished wherein we were born, and the night in 
which it was said there is a child conceived. 

I trust that in a little while, there will be few of our rich 
men who, through carelessness or covetousness, thus forfeit the 
glorious office which is intended for their hands. I said, just 
now, that wealth ill-used was as the net of the spider, entan- 
gling and destroying: but wealth well used, is as the net of the 
sacred fisher who gathers souls of men out of the deep. A 
time will come — I do not think even now it is far from us — • 
when this golden net of the world's wealth "wiU be spread 
abroad as the flaming meshes of morning cloud are over the 
sky ; bearing with them the joy of light and the dew of the 
morning, as Avell as the summons to honorable and peaceful 



412 MORALS AND RELIGION. 

toil. What less can we hope from your wealth than 
this, rich men of England, when once you feel fully how, by 
the strength of your possessions — not, observe, by the exhaus- 
tion, but by the administration of them and the power — you 
can direct the acts, — command the energies — inform the 
ignorance, — prolong the existence, of the whole human 
race ; and how, even of worldly wisdom, which man employs 
faithfully, it is true, not only that her ways are pleasantness, 
but that her jjaths are peace ; and that, for all the children 
of men, as well as for those to whom she is given, Length 
of days are in her right hand, as in her left hand Riches and 
Honor ? 

We are-.too much in the habit of considering happy accidents 
as what are called " special Providences ;" and thinking that 
when any great work needs to be done, the man who is to do 
it Avill certainly be pointed out by Providence, be he shepherd 
or sea-boy ; and prepared for his work by all kinds of minor 
providences, in the best possible way. Whereas all the 
analogies of God's operations in other matters prove the 
contrary of this; we find that "of thousand seeds, He often 
brings but one to bear," often not one ; and the one seed 
which He appoints to bear is allowed to bear crude or perfect 
fruit according to the dealings of the husbandman with it. 
And there cannot be a doubt in the mind of any pei'son 
accustomed to take broad and logical views of the world's 
history, that its events are ruled by Providence in precisely 
the same manner as its harvests ; that the seeds of good and 
evil are broadcast among men, just as the seeds of thistles and 
fruits are ; and that according to the force of our industry, 
and wisdom of our husbandry, the ground will bring forth to 
us figs or thistles. So tliat when it seems needed that a certain 
work should be done for the world, and no man is there to do 



THE DOCTRINE OF SPECIAL PROVIDENCES. 413 

it, we have no right to say that God did not wish it to be done ; 
and therefore sent no man able to do it. The probability (if I 
wrote my own comdctions, I should say certainty) is, that He 
sent many men, hundreds of men, able to do it ; and that we 
have rejected them, or crushed them ; by our previous folly of 
conduct or of institution, we have rendered it impossible to 
distmguish, or impossible to reach them ; and when the need 
for them comes, and we suffer for the want of them, it is not 
that God refuses to send us deliverers, and specially appoints 
all our consequent sufferings ; but that He has sent, and we have 
refused, the deliverers ; and the pain is then wrought out by His 
eternal law, as surely as famine is wrought out by eternal law 
for a nation which will neither plough nor sow. No less are 
we in error in supposing, as we so frequently do, thj»t if a man 
be found, he is sure to be in all respects fitted for the work to 
be done, as the key is to the lock ; and that every accident which 
happened in the forging him, only adapted him more truly to 
the wards. It is pitiful to hear historians beguiling themselves 
and their readers, by tracing in the early history of great men, 
the minor circumstances which fitted them for the work they 
did, without ever taking notice of the other circumstances 
which as assuredly unfitted them for it; so concluding that 
miraculous interposition prepared them in all points for every- 
thing, and that they did all that could have been desired or 
hoped for from them : whereas the certainty of the matter is 
that, throughout their lives, they were thwarted and corrupted 
by some things as certainly as they were helped and disciplined 
by others ; and that, in the kindliest and most reverent view 
which can justly be taken of them, they were but poor mistaken 
creatures, struggling with a world more profoundly mistaken 
than they ; — assuredly sinned against, or sinning in thousands 
of ways, and bringing out at last a maimed result — not what 
they might or ought to have done, but all that could be done 



414 MORALS AND RELIGION. 

against the world's resistance, and in sjjite of theii own 
sorrowful falsehood to themselves. 

And this being so, it is the practical duty of a wise nation, 
first to withdraw, as far as may be, its youth from destructive 
mfluences ; — then to try its material as far as possible, and to 
lose the use of none that is good. I do not mean by " with- 
drawing from destructive influences" the keeping of youths 
out of trials ; but the keeping them out of the way of things 
purely and absolutely mischievous. I do not mean that we 
should shade our green corn in all heat, and shelter it in all 
frost, but only that we should dyke out the inundation from 
it, and drive the fowls away from it. Let your youth labor 
and sufier ; but do not let it starve, nor steal, nor blaspheme. 

Examine well the channels of your admiration, and you will 
find that they are, in verity, as unchangeable as the channels 
of your heart's blood ; that just as by the pressure of a bandage, 
or by perpetual and unwholesome action of some part of the 
body, that blood may be wasted or arrested, and in its stagnancy 
cease to nourish the frame, or in its disturbed flow affect it with 
incurable disease, so also admiration itself may, by the bandages 
of fashion, bound close over the eyes and the arteries of the soul, 
be arrested in its natural pulse and healthy flow; but that 
whenever the artificial pressure is removed, it will return into 
that bed which has been traced for it by the finger of God. 

Custom has no real influence upon our feelings of the beautiful, 
except m dulling and checking them. You see the broad blue 
t)kj every day over your heads ; but you do not for that reason 
determine blue to be more or less beautiful than you did at first ; 
you are unaccustomed to SQe stones as blue as the sapphire, but 
you do not for that reason think the sapphire less beautiful than 
other stones. The blue color is everlastingly appointed by the 
Deity to be a source of deUght. 



EOMANCE AND UTOPIANISM. 416 

Let US think for a few moments what romance and Utopianism 
mean. 

First, romance. In consequence of the many absurd fictions 
which long formed the elements of romance writing, the word 
romance is sometimes taken as synonymous with falsehood. 
Thus the French talk of Des Romans^ and thus the English 
use the word Romancing. 

But in this sense we had much better use the word falsehood 
at once. It is far plainer and clearer. And if in this sense I put 
anything romantic before you, pray pay no attention to it, or 
to me. 

In the second place. Because young people are particularly 
apt to indulge in reverie, and imaginative pleasures, and to 
neglect their plain and practical duties, the word ronia7itic has 
come to signify Aveak, foolish, speculative, unpractical, unprin- 
cipled. In all these cases it would be much better to say weak, 
foolish, unpractical, unprincii^led. The words are clearer. If in 
this sense, also, I put anything romantic before you, i)ray pay 
no attention to me. 

The real and proper use of the word romantiG is simply to 
characterise an improbable or unaccustomed degree of beauty, 
sublimity, or virtue. For instance, in matters of history, is not 
the Retreat of the Ten Thousand romantic ? Is not the death 
of Leonidas ? of the Horatii ? On the other hand, you find 
nothing romantic, though much that is monstrous, in the 
excesses of Tiberius or Commodus. So again, the battle of 
Agincourt is romantic, and of Bannockburn, simply because 
there was an extraordinary display of human virtue in both 
those battles. But there is no romance in the battles of the 
last Italian campaign, in which mere feebleness and distrust 
were on one side, mere physical force on the other. And even 
in fiction, the opponents of virtue, in order to be romantic, 
must have sublimity mingled with their vice. It is not the 



416 MORALS AND RELIGION. 

knave, not the ruffian, that are romantic, but the giant and the 
dragon ; and these, not because they are false, but because 
they are majestic. So again as to beauty. You feel that 
armor is romantic because it is a beautiful dress, and you are 
not used to it. You do not feel there is anythmg romantic in 
the paint and shells of a Sandwich Islander, for these are not 
beautiful. 

So, then, observe, this feeling which you are accustomed to 
despise — this secret and j)oetical enthusiasm in all your hearts, 
wliich, as practical men, you try to restrain — is indeed one of 
the holiest parts of your being. It is the instinctive delight 
in, and admiration for, sublimity, beauty, and virtue, unusually 
manifested. And so far from being a dangerous guide, it is 
the truest part of your being. It is even truer than your 
consciences. A man's conscience may be utterly perverted 
and led astray ; but so long as the feelings of romance endure 
within us, they are unerring — they are as true to what is right 
and lovely as the needle to the north ; and all that you have 
to do is to add to the enthusiastic sentiment, the majestic 
judgment — to mingle prudence and foresight with imagina- 
tion and admiration, and you have the perfect human soul. 
But the great evil of these days is that we try to destroy the 
romantic feeling, instead of bridling and directing it. Mark 
what Yoimg says of the men of the world : 

" They, who think nought so strong of the romance, 
So rank knight-errant, as a real friend." 

And they are right. True friendship is romantic, to the men 
of the world — true affection is romantic — true religion ia 
romantic ; and if you were to ask me who of all powerful and 
popular writers in the cause of error had wrought most harm 
to their race, I should hesitate in reply whether to name 



QUIXOTISM, OK UTOriANISM. 41^ 

Voltaire or Byron, or the last most ingenious and most venom 
ous of the degraded philosophers of Germany, or rather 
Cervantes, for he cast scorn upon the holiest principles of 
humanity — he, of all men, most helped forward the terrible 
change in the soldiers of Europe, from the spirit of Bayard to 
the spirit of Bonaparte,* helped to change loyalty into license, 
protection into plunder, truth into treachery, chivalry into sel- 
fishness ; and since his time, the purest impulses and the noblest 
purposes have perhaps been oftener stayed by the devil, under 
the name of Quixotism, than under any other base name or 
false allegation. 

Quixotism, or Utopianism: that is another of the devil's 
pet words. I believe the quiet admission which we are 
all of us so ready to make, that, because things have long been 
wrong, it is impossible they should ever be right, is one of 
the most fatal sources of misery and crime from which this 
world suflers. Whenever you hear a man dissuading you from 
attempting to do well, on the ground that perfection is 
" Utopian," beware of that man. Cast the word out of your 
dictionary altogether. There is no need for it. Things are 
either possible or impossible — you can easily determine which, 
in any given state of human science. If the thing is impossi- 
ble, you need not trouble yourselves about it ; if possible, try 
for it. It is very Utopian to hope for the entire doing away 
with drunkenness and misery out of the Canongate ; but the 
Utopianism is not our business — the loork is. It is Utojjian to 
hope to give eveiy child in this kingdom the knowledge of 
God from its youth ; but the Utopianism is not our business — - 
the work is. 



* I mean no scandal against the ^yresent emperor of the French, whose truth 
has, I believe, been as conspicuous in the late political negotiations, as his deci* 
sion and prudence have been throughout the whole course of his government 

18* 



418 MORALS AND KELIGION. 

You know how often it is difficult to be wisely charitable, to 
do good without multiplying the sources of evil. You know 
that to give alms is nothing unless you give thought also ; and 
that therefore it is written, not "blessed is he thutfeedeth the 
poor," but, " blessed is he that considereth the poor." And 
you know that a little thought and a little kindness are often 
worth more than a great deal of money. 

Kow this charity of thought is not merely to be exercised 
towards the poor ; it is to be exercised towards all men. 
There is assuredly no action of our social life, however unini- 
jjortant, which, by kindly thought, may not be made to have 
a beneficial influence upon others ; and it is impossible to spend 
the smallest sum of money, for any not absolutely necessary 
purpose, without a grave responsibility attaching to the man- 
ner of spending it. The object we ourselves covet may, indeed, 
be desirable and harmless, so far as we are concerned, but the 
providing us with it may, perhaps, be a very prejudicial occu- 
pation to some one else. And then it becomes instantly a 
moral question, whether we are to indulge ourselves or not. 
AVliatever we wish to buy, we ought first to consider not only 
if the thiiiff be fit for us, but if the manufacture of it be a whole- 
some and happy one ; and if, on the whole, the sum we are 
going to spend will do as much good spent in this way as it 
would if spent in any other way. It may be said that we have 
not time to consider all this before we make a purchase. But 
no time could be spent in a more important duty ; and God 
never imposes a duty without giving the time to do it. Let 
us, however, only acknowledge the principle ; — once make up 
your mind to allow the consideration of the effect of your 
purchases to regulate the kind of your purchase, and you will 
soon easily find grounds enough to decide upon. The plea of 
ignorance will never take away our rcsponsibiUties. It is writ- 
ten, "If thou saycst, Behold we knew it not; doth not he 



THE MANAGEMENT OP RICHES. 419 

that pondereth the heart consider it? and he that keepeth thy 
soul, doth not he know it ?" 

There is another branch of decorative art in wliich I am 
sorry to say we cannot, at least under existing circumstances, 
indulge ourselves, with the hojje of doing good to anybody, 1 
mean the great and subtle art of dress. 

And here I must interrupt the pursuit of our subject for a 
moment or two, in order to state one of the principles of 
political economy, which, though it is, I believe, now sufficiently 
understood and asserted by the leading masters of the science, 
is not yet, I grieve to say, acted upon by the plurality of those 
who have the management of riches. Whenever we spend 
money, we of course set people to work : that is the meaning 
of spending money ; we may, indeed, lose it without employing 
anybody ; but, whenever we spend it, we set a number of 
people to work, greater or less, of course, according to the rate 
of wages, but in the long run, proportioned to the sum we 
spend. Well, your shallow people, because they see that how- 
ever they spend money they are always employing somebody, 
and, therefore, doing some good, think and say to themselves, 
that it is all one how they spend it — that all their apparently 
selfish luxury is, in reality, unselfish, and is doing just as much 
good as if they gave all their money away, or perhaps more 
good; and I have heard foolish people even declare it is a 
l^rinciple of political economy, that whoever invented a new 
want conferred a good on the community. I have not words 
strong enough — at least I could not, without shocking you, 
use the words which would be strong enough — to express my 
estimate of the absurdity and the mischievousness of this 
popular fallacy. So putting a great restraint upon myself, and 
using no hard Avords, I will simply try to state the nature of 
it, and the extent of its influence. 

Granted, that whenever we spend money for whatever 



420 MORALS AND KELIGION. 

purpose, we set people to work ; and passing by, for the moment, 
the question whether the work we set them to is all equally 
healthy and good for them, we will assume that whenever w e 
spend a guinea we provide an equal number of people with 
healthy maintenance for a given time. But, by the way ia 
which we spend it, we entirely direct the labor of those 
people during that given time. We become their masters 
or mistresses, and we compel them to produce, within a 
certain period, a certain article. Now, that article may 
be a useful and lasting one, or it may be a useless and 
perishable one — it may be one useful to the whole community, 
or useful only to ourselves. And our selfishness and folly, 
or our virtue and prudence, are shown, not by our spending 
money, but by our spending it for the wrong or right thing , 
and we are wise and kind, not in maintaining a certain number 
of people for a given period, but only in requiring them to 
produce, during that period, the kind of things which shall be 
useful to society, instead of those which are only useful to 
ourselves. 

Thus, for instance : if you are a young lady, and employ a 
certain number of sempstresses for a given time, in making a 
given number of simple and seiwiceable dresses, suppose, seven ; 
of which you can wear one yourself for half the winter, and 
give six away to poor girls who have none, you are spending 
your money unselfishly. But if you employ the same number 
of sempstresses for the same number of days, in making four, 
or five, or six beautiful flounces for your own ball-dress^ 
flounces which wall clothe no one but yourself, and which you 
will yourself be unable to wear at more than one ball — you are 
employing your money selfishly. You have maintained, indeed . 
in each case the same number of people ; but in the one case you 
have directed their labor to the service of the community ; in 
the other case you have consumed it wholly upon yourself 



THE MANAGEMENT OF KICHES. 421 

I don't say you are never to do so ; I don't say you ought not 
sometimes to think of yourselves only, and to make yourselves 
as pretty as you can ; only do not confuse coqucttishness with 
benevolence, nor cheat yourselves into tliinking that all the 
finery you can wear is so much put into the hungry mouths of 
those beneath you : it is not so ; it is what you yourselves, 
whether you will or no, must sometimes instinctively feel it to 
be — it is what those who stand shivering in the streets, forming 
a line to watch you as you step out of your carriages, know it 
to be ; those fine dresses do not mean that so much has been 
put into their mouths, but that so much has been taken out 
of their mouths. The real politico-economical signification of 
every one of those beautiful toilettes, is just this; that you 
have had a certain number of people put for a certain number 
of days wholly under your authority, by the sternest of slave- 
masters, — hunger and cold ; and you have said to them, " I will 
feed you, indeed, and clothe you, and give you fuel for so many 
days ; but during those days you shall work for me only : your 
little brothers need clothes, but you shall make none for them : 
your sick friend needs clothes, but you shall make none for her : 
you yourself will soon need another, and a warmer dress; but 
you shall make none for yourself You shall make nothing but 
lace and roses for me; for this fortnight to come, you shall 
work at the patterns and petals, and then I will crush and 
consume them away in an hour," You will perhaps answer — 
"It may not be particularly benevolent to do this, and we 
won't call it so ; but at any rate we do no wrong in taking their 
labor when we pay them their wages : if we pay for their work 
we have a right to it." No ; — a thousand times no. The labor 
which you have paid for, does indeed become, by the act of 
purchase, your own labor: yon have bought the hands and 
the time of those workers ; they are, by right and justice, your 
own hands, your own time. But have you a right to spend 



422 MOKALS AND RELIGION. 

your own time, to work with your own hands, only for your 
o^\^l advantage ? — much more, when, by purchase, you have 
invested your own person with the strength of others ; and 
added to your own Ufe, a part of the life of others ? You 
may, indeed, to a certain extent, use their labor for your 
delight ; remember, I am making no general assertions against 
splendor of dress, or pomp of accessaries of life ; on the con- 
trary, there are many reasons for thinking that we do not at 
present attach enough importance to beautiful dress, as one 
of the means of influencing general taste and charactei". But 
I do say, that you must weigh the value of what you ask these 
workers to produce for you in its own distinct balance ; that on 
its own worthiness or desirableness rests the question of your 
kindness, and not merely on the fact of your having employed 
people in producing it : and I say farther, that as long as there 
are cold and nakedness in the land around you, so long there 
can be no question at all but that splendor of dress is a crime. 
In due time, when we have nothing better to set people to 
work at, it may be light to let them make lace and cut jewels ; 
but, as long as there are any who have no blankets for their beds, 
and no rags for their bodies, so long it is blanket-making and 
tailoring Ave must set people to work at — not lace. 

And it would be strange, if at any great assembly which, 
while it dazzled the young and the thoughtless, beguiled the 
gentler hearts that beat beneath the embroidery, with a placid 
sensation of luxurious benevolence — as if by all that they Avore 
in Avaywardness of beauty, comfort had first been given to the 
distressed, and aid to the indigent ; it Avould be strange, I say, 
if, for a moment, the spirits of Truth and of Terror, which 
Avalk invisibly among the masques of the earth, Avould lift the 
dimness from our erring thoughts, and shoAV us how — inasmuch 
as the sums exhausted for that magnificence would have given 
back the failing breath to many an unsheltered outcast on mooi 



DRESS A MEANS OF EDUCATIOIST. 423 

and street — they who weai* it have literally entered intc 
partnership with Death ; and dressed themselves in his spoils. 
Yes, if the veil could be lifted not only from your thoughts, 
but from your human sight, you would see — the angels do see 
— on those gay white dresses of yours, strange dark spots, 
and crimson patterns that you knew not of — spots of the inex- 
tinguishable red that all the seas cannot wash away ; yes, and 
among the pleasant flowers that cro\vn your fair heads, and 
glow on your wreathed hair, you would see that one weed was 
always twisted which no one thought of — the grass that grows 
on graves. 

It was not, however, this last, this clearest and most appal- 
ling view of-our subject, that I intended to ask you to take this 
evening ; only it is impossible to set any pai't of the matter in 
its true light, until we go to the root of it. But the point 
which it is our special business to consider is, not whether 
costliness of dress is contrary to charity ; but whether it is not 
contrary to mere worldly wisdom : whether, even supposing 
Ave knew that splendor of dress did not cost suffering or 
hunger, we might not put the splendor better in other things 
than dress. And, supposing our mode of dress were really 
graceful or beautiful, this might be a very doubtful question ; 
for I believe true nobleness of dress to be an important means 
of education, as it certainly is a necessity to any nation which 
wishes to possess living art, concei'ned with portraiture of 
human nature. No good historical painting ever yet existed, 
or ever can exist, where the dresses of the people of the time 
are not beautiful : and had it not been for the lovely and fantastic 
dressing of the 13th to the 16th centuries, neither French, nor 
Florentine, nor Venetian art could have risen to anything like 
the rank it reached. Still, even then, the best dressing was 
never the costliest ; and its effect depended much more on its 
beautiful, and, in early times, modest, arrangement, and on the 



424 MOKALS AND RELIGION. 

simple and lovely masses of its color, tliau on gorgeousness 
of clasp or embroidery. Whether we can ever return to any 
of those more perfect types of form is questionable ; but there 
can be no question, that all the money we spend on the forms 
of dress at present worn, is, so far as any good purpose is 
concerned, wholly lost. Mind, in saying this, I reckon among 
good purposes the purpose Avhich young ladies are said some- 
times to entertain — of being married; but they would be 
married quite as soon (and probably to wiser and better 
husbands) by dressing quietly as by dressing brilliantly ; and I 
believe it would only be needed to lay fairly and largely before 
them the real good which might be effected by the sums they 
spend in toilettes, to make them trust at once only to their bright 
eyes and braided hair for all the mischief they have a mind to. 
I wish we could, for once, get the statistics of a London season. 
There was much complaining talk in Parliament of the 
vast sum the nation has given for the best Paul Veronese 
in Venice — £14,000 : I wonder what the nation meanwhile has 
given for its ball-dresses ! Suppose we could see the London 
milliners' bills, simply for unnecessary breadths of slip and 
flounces, from April to July ; I wonder whether £14,000 would 
cover them. But the breadths of slip and flounces are by this 
time as much lost and vanished as last year's snow ; only they 
have done less good : but the Paul Veronese will last for 
centuries, if we take care of it ; and yet we grumble at the 
price given for the painting, while no one grumbles at the 
price of })ride. 

Time does not permit me to go into any farther illustration 
of the various modes in which we build our statue out of snow, 
and waste our labor on things that vanish. 

Things which are a mere luxury to one person are a means 
of intellectual occupation to another. Flowers in a London 



REAL PROPERTY. 425 

ball-room are a luxury ; in a botanical garden, a delight of the 
intellect ; and in their native fields, both ; while the most 
noble works of art are continually made material of vulgar 
luxury or of criminal pride ; but, when rightly used, property 
of this class is the only kind which deserves the name of real 
property ; it is the only kind which a man can truly be said to 
" possess," What a man eats, or drinks, or wears, so long as 
it is only what is needful for life, can no more be thought of 
as his possession than the air he breathes. The air is as need- 
ful to him as the food ; but we do not talk of a man's wealth 
of air, and what food or clothing a man possesses more than 
he himself requires, must be for others to use (and, to him, 
therefore, not a real property in itself, but only a means of 
obtaining some real property in exchange for it). Whereas 
the things that give intellectual or emotional enjoyment may 
be accumulated and do not perish in using ; but continually 
supply new pleasures and new powers of giving pleasures to 
others. And these, therefore, are the only things which can 
rightly be thought of as giving " wealth " or " well being." 
Food conduces only to " being," but these to " well being," 
And there is not any broader general distinction between 
lower and higher ordei's of men than rests on their possession 
of this real property. The human race may be properly 
divided by zoologists into " men who have gardens, libraries, 
or works of art ; and who have none ;" and the former class 
will include all noble persons, except only a few who make the 
world their garden or museum ; while the people who have 
not, or, which is the same thing, do not care for gardens or 
libraries, but care for nothing but money or luxuries, will 
include none but ignoble persons : only it is necessary to 
understand that I mean by the term " garden " as much the 
Carthusian's plot of ground fifteen feet square between his 
monastery buttresses, as I do the grounds of Chatsworth oi 



426 MORALS AND KELIGIOX. 

Kew ; and I mean by the term " art " as much the old sailor's 
print of the Arethusa bearing up to engage the Belle Poule, 
as I do Raphael's " Disputa," and even rather more ; for when 
abundant, beautiful possessions of this kind are almost always 
associated with vulgar luxury, and become then anything but 
indicative of noble character in their possessors. The ideal of 
human life is a union of Spartan simplicity of manners with 
Athenian sensibility and imagination, but in actual results, we 
are continually mistaking ignorance for simplicity, and sensu- 
ality for refinement. 

In general^ pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes. All 
the other passions do occasional good, but wherever pride puts 
in its word, everything goes wrong, and what it might be desi- 
rable to do quietly and innocently, it is morally dangerous to 
do proudly. 

To be content in utter darkness and ignorance is indeed 
unmanly, and therefore we think that to love light and seek 
knowledge must always be right. Yet wherever pr^f?e has 
any share in the Avork, even knowledge and light may be ill 
pursued. Knowledge is good, and light is good, yet man' 
perished in seeking knowledge, and moths perished in seeking 
light ; and if we, who are crushed before the moth, will not 
accept such mystery as is needful for us, we shall perish in like 
manner. But, accepted in humbleness, it instantly becomes 
an element of pleasure ; and I think that every rightly con- 
stituted mind ought to rejoice, not so much in knowing any- 
thing clearly, as in feeling that there is infinitely more which 
it cannot know. None but proud or weak men would mourn 
over this, for we may always know more if we choose, by 
working on ; but the pleasure is, I think, to humble people, in 
knowing that the journey is endless, the treasure inexhausti- 



CONCEPTION OF GOD. 421 

ble, — watching the clovid still march before them with its 
summitless pillar, and being sure that, to the end of time and 
to the length of eternity, the mysteries of its infinity will still 
open farther and farther, their dimness being the sign and 
necessary adjunct of their inexhaustibleness. I know there 
are an evil mystery and a deathful dimness, — the mystery of 
the great Babylon — the dimness of the sealed eye and soul ; 
but do not let us confuse these with the glorious mystery of 
the things which the angels " desire to look into," or with the 
dimness which, even before the clear eye and open soul, still 
rests on sealed pages of the eternal volume. 

The ardor and abstraction of the spiritual life are to be 
honored in themselves, though the one may be misguided and 
the other deceived ; and the deserts of Osma, Assisi, and 
Monte Viso are still to be thanked for the zeal they gave, or 
guarded, whether we find it in St, Francis and St. Dominic, 
or in those whom God's hand hid from them in the clefts of 
the rocks. 

"We refine and explain ourselve.s into dim and distant suspi- 
cion of an inactive God, inhabiting inconceivable places, and 
fading into the multitudinous formalisms of the laws of 
Nature. 

All errors of this kind — and in the present day we are in 
constant and grievous danger of falling into them — arise from 
the originally mistaken idea that man can, " by searching, find 
out God — find out the Almighty to perfection ;" that is to say, 
by help of courses of reasoning and accumulations of science, 
apprehend the nature of the Deity in a more exalted and more 
accurate manner than in a state of comparative ignorance ; 
Mherc>as it is clearly necessary, from the beginning to the end 
of time, tliat God's way of revealing Himself to His creatures 
should be a simjole way, wliich all those creatures may under- 



428 MORALS A?fD RELIGION. 

stand. Whether taught or untaught, whether of mean capa- 
city cr enlarged, it is necessary that communion with their 
Creator should be possible to all ; and the admission to such 
communion must be rested, not on their having a knowledge 
of astronomy, but on their having a human soul. In order to 
render this communion possible, the Deity has stooped from 
His throne, and has not only, in the person of the Son, taken 
upon Him the veil of our human Jlesh, but, in the person of the 
Father, taken upon Him the veil of our Human thoughts, and 
permitted us, by His own spoken authority, to conceive Him 
simply and clearly as a loving Father and Friend ; — a being 
to be walked with and reasoned with ; to be moved by oui 
entreaties, angered by our rebellion, alienated by our coldness, 
pleased by our love, and glorified by our labor ; and, finally, 
to be beheld in immediate and active presence in all the pow- 
ers and changes of creation. This conception of God, which 
is the child's, is evidently the only one which can be universal, 
and therefore the only one which for us can be true. The 
moment that, in our pride of heart, we refuse to accept the 
condescension of the Almighty, and desire Him, instead of 
stooping to hold our hands, to rise up before us into His glory, 
— we hoping that by standing on a grain of dust or two of 
human knowledge higher than our fellows, we may behold the 
Creator as He rises, — God takes us at our word ; He rises, 
into His own invisible and inconceivable majesty ; He goes 
forth upon the ways which are not our ways, and retires into 
the thoughts which are not our thoughts ; and we are left 
lone. And presently we say in our vain hearts, " There is no 
God." 

It may be proved, with much certainty, that God intends no 
man to live in this world without working : but it seems to me 
no less evident that He intends every man to be happy in his 



MAN SHOULD BE HAPPY IN HIS WORK. 429 

work. It is written, "in the sweat of thy brow," bat it was 
never A^Titten, " in the breaking of thine heart," thou shalt eat 
bread : and I find that, as on the one hand, infinite misery is 
caused by idle people, who both fail in doing what was appointed 
for them to do, and set in motion various springs of mischief in 
matters in which they should have had no concern, so on the 
other hand, no small misery is caused by ovei*-worked and 
unhappy people, in the dark idews which they necessarily take 
up themselves, and force upon others, of work itself. Were it 
not so, I believe the fact of their bemg unhaj^py is in itself a 
violation of divine law, and a sign of some kind of folly or sin 
in their way of life. Now in order that people may be happy 
in theii' work, these three things are needed : They must be fit 
for it : They must not do too much of it : and they must have 
a sense of success in it — not a doubtful sense, such as needs some 
testimony of other people for its confirmation, but a sure sense, 
or rather knowledge, that so much work has been done well, 
and fruitfully done, whatever the world may say or think about 
it. So that in order that a man may be happy,^t is necessaiy 
that he should not only be capable of his work, but a good judge 
of his work. 

The first thing then that he has to do, if unhappily his parents 
or masters have not done it for him, is to find out what he is fit 
for. In which inquiry a man may be very safely guided by his 
likings, if he be not also guided by his pride. People usually 
reason in some such fashion as this : " I don't seem quite fit for 

a head-manager in the firm of & Co., therefore, in all 

probability, I am fit to be Chancellor of the Exchequer." 
Whereas, they ought rather to reason thus : " I don't seem 

quite fit to be head-manager in the firm of & Co., but 

I dare say I might do something in a small greengrocery busi- 
ness ; I used to be a good judge of pease ;" that is to say, always 
trying loAver instead of trying higher, until they find bottom: 



430 MORALS AND RELIGION. 

once well set on the ground, a man may build up by degrees, 
safely, instead of disturbing every one in his neighborhood by 
perpetual catastrophes. But this kind of humility is rendered 
especially difficult in these days, by the contu.mely thrown on 
men in humble employments. The very removal of the massy 
bars which once separated one class of society from another, 
has ]'endered it tenfold more shameful in foolish people's, i. e. in 
most people's eyes, to remain in the lower grades of it, than 
ever it was before. When a man born of an artisan was looked 
upon as an entirely different species of animal from a man born 
of a noble, it made him no more uncomfortable or ashamed to 
remain that different species of animal, than it makes a horse 
ashamed to remain a horse, and not to become a giraffe. But 
now that a man may make money, and rise in the world, and 
associate himself, unreproached, with jjeople once far above 
him, not only is the natural discontentedness of humanity 
developed to an unheard-of extent, whatever a man's position, 
but it becomes a veritable shame to him to remain in the state 
he was born in, and everybody thinks it his duty to try to be a 
" gentleman." Persons who have any influence in the manage- 
ment of public institutions for charitable education know how 
common this feeling has become. Hardly a day passes but they 
receive letters from mothers who want all their six or eight sons 
to go to college, and make the grand tour in the long vacation, 
and who think there is something wrong in the foundations of 
society, because this is not possible. Out of every ten letters 
of this kind, nine will allege, as the reason of the writers' 
importunity, their desire to keep their families in such and 
such a " station of life." There is no real desire for the safety, 
the discipline, or the moral good of the children, only a panic 
horror of the inexpressibly pitiable calamity of their living a 
ledge or two lower on the molehill of the world — a calamity to 
be averted at any cost whatever, of struggle, anxiety, and 



PERNICIOUSNESS OF OVER-WORKING. 431 

shortening of life itself. I do not believe that any greatei* good 
could be achieved for the country, than the change in pubhc 
feelmg on this head, which might be brought about by a few 
benevolent men, undeniably in the class of " gentlemen," who 
would, on principle, enter hato some of our commonest trades, 
and make them honorable ; showing that it was possible for a 
man to retain his dignity, and remam, in the best sense, a 
gentleman, though jDart of his time was every day occupied in 
manual labor, or even in serving customers over a counter. 
I do not in the least see why courtesy, and gravity, and sym- 
pathy with the feelmgs of others, and courage, and truth, and 
piety, and what else goes to make up a gentleman's character, 
should not be found behind a counter as well as elsewhere, if 
they were demanded, or even hoped for, there. 

Let us suppose, then, that the man's way of hfe and manner 
of work have been discreetly chosen ; then the next thing to be 
required is, that he do not over-work himself therein. I am not 
going to say anything here about the various errors in our 
systems of society and commerce, which appear (I am not 
sure if they ever do more than appear) to force us to over-work 
ourselves merely that we may live ; nor about the still more 
fruitful cause of unhealthy toil — the incapability, in many men, 
of being content -with the little that is indeed necessary to 
their happiness. I have only a word or two to say about one 
special cause of over- work — the ambitious desire of doing great 
or clever things, and the hope of accomplishing them by 
immense efforts : hope as vain as it is pernicious ; not only 
making men over-work themselves, but rendering all the work 
they do unwholesome to them. I say it is a vain hope, and let 
the reader be assured of this (it is a truth all-important to the 
best mterests of humanity). JSfo great intellectual thing was 
ever done by great effort ; a gre_at thing can only be done by a 
gi-eat man, and he does it without effort. Nothing is, at present. 



432 MORALS AND EELIGION. 

less understood by us than this — nothing is more necessary tc 
be understood. Let me try to say it as clearly, and explam it 
as fuUy as I may. 

I have said no great intellectual thing : for I do not mean the 
assertion to extend to things moral. On the contrary, it seems 
to me that just because we are intended, as long as we live, to 
be in a state of intense moral effort, we are not intended to be 
in intense physical or intellectual effort. Our full energies are 
to be given to the soul's work — to the great fight with the 
Dragon — the taking the kingdom of heaven by force. But the 
body's work and head's work are to be done quietly, and 
comparatively without effort. Neither limbs nor brain are ever 
to be strained to their utmost ; that is not the way in which the 
greatest quantity of work is to be got out of them : they are 
never to be worked furiously, but with tranquillity and con- 
stancy. We are to follow the plough from sunrise to sunset, 
but not to pull in race-boats at the twilight : we shall get no fruit 
of that kind of work, only disease of the heart. 

How many pangs would be spared to thousands, if this great 
truth and law were but once sincerely, humbly underftood, — 
that if a great thing can be done at all, it can be done easily ; 
that, when it is needed to be done, there is perhaps only one 
man in the world who can do it ; but he can do it without any 
trouble — without more trouble, that is, than it costs small people 
to do small things ; nay, perhaps, with less. And yet what truth 
lies more openly on the surface of all human phenomena ? Is not 
the evidence of Ease on the very front of all the greatest works 
in existence ? Do they not say plainly to us, not, " there has 
been a great effort here," but, "there has been a great power 
here" ? It is not the weariness of mortality, but the strength 
of divinity, which we have to recognise in all mighty things; 
and that is just what we now never recognise, but think that 
we are to do great things, by help of iron bars and perspiration 



GEXIUS AiTO LABOR. 433 

— alas ! we shall do nothing that way but lose some pounds of 
our own weight. 

Yet, let me not be misunderstood, nor this great truth be 
supi^osed anywise resolvable into the favorite dogma of young 
men, that they need not work if they have genius. The fact 
is that a man of genius is always far more ready to work than 
other people, and gets so much more good from the work that 
he does, and is often so little conscious of the inherent divinity 
in himself, that he is very apt to ascribe all his capacity to his 
work, and to tell those who ask how he came to be what he is: 
" If I am anything, which I much doubt, I made myself so 
merely by labor." This was Newton's way of talking, and I 
suppose it would be the general tone of men whose genius had 
been devoted to the i^hysical sciences. Genius in the Arts 
must commonly be more self-conscious, but m whatever field, 
it will always be distinguished by its perpetual, steady, well 
directed, happy, and faithful labor in accumulating and dis- 
ciplining its powers, as well as by its gigantic, incommunicable 
facility in exercising them. Therefore, literally, it is no man's 
business whether he has genius or not : work he must, whatever 
he is, but quietly and steadily ; and the natural and unfoiced 
results of such work will be always the things that God meant 
him to do, and will be his best. No agonies nor heart-rendings 
will enable him to do any better. If he be a great man, they 
will be great things ; if a small man, small things ; but always, 
if thus peacefully done, good and right ; always, if restlessly and 
ambitiously done, false, hollow, and despicable. 

Then the third thing needed was, I said, that a man should 
b'j a good judge of his work ; and this chiefly that he may not 
be dependent upon popular ojjinion for the manner of doing it, 
but also that he may have the just encouragement of the sense 
of progress, and an honest consciousness of victory : how else 
can he become 

19 



434 MORALS AND RELIGION. 

" That awful independent on to-morrow, 
"Whose yesterdays look backwards with a smile." 

I aiu persuaded that the real nourishment and help of such a 
feeUng as this is nearly unknown to half the workmen of the 
present day. For whatever appearance of self-complacency 
there may be in their outward bearing, it is visible enough, by 
their feverish jealousy of each other, how little confidence they 
have in the sterling value of their several doings. Conceit 
may puff a man up, but never prop him up ; and there is too 
visible distress and hopelessness in men's aspects to admit of 
the supposition that they have any stable support of faith in 
themselves. 

I have stated these principles generally, because there is no 
branch of labor to which they do not apply: But there is one 
in which our ignorance or forgetfulness of them has caused an 
incalculable amount of suffering : and I would endeavor now 
to reconsider them with especial reference to it, — the branch 
of the Arts. 

In general, the men who are employed m the Arts have 
freely chosen their profession, and suppose themselves to have 
special faculty for it ; yet, as a body, they are not happy men. 
For which this seems to me the reason, that they are expected, 
and themselves expect, to make their bread hy being clever — 
not by steady or quiet work ; and are, therefore, for the most 
part, trying to be clevci", and so living in an utterly false state 
of mind and action. 

This is the case, to the same extent, in no other profession or 
employment. A lawyer may hideed suspect that, unless he 
has more wit than those around him, he is not likely to advance 
in his profession ; but he will not be always thinking how he is 
to display his wit. He will generally understand, early in his 
career, that wit must be left to take care of itself, and that it 
is hard knowledge of law and vi^rorous examination and collation 



FUNCTION OF THE ARTIST. 435 

of the fiicts of every case entrusted to him, which his clients will 
mainly demand ; this it is which he has to be j)aid for ; and tliis 
is healthy and measurable labor, payable by the hour. If he 
happen to have keen natural perception and quick wit, these 
will come into play in their due time and jjlace, but he will not 
tliink of them as his chief power; and if lie have them not, ho 
may still hope tha-t industry and conscientiousness may enable 
him to rise in his profession without them. Again in the case 
of clergpiien : that they are sorely tem})ted to display their 
eloquence or wit, none who know their own hearts will deny, 
but then they know this to he a temptation : they never would 
supj)ose that cleverness was all that was to be expected from 
them, or would sit down dehberately to write a clever sermon : 
even the dullest or vainest of them would throw some veil 
over their vanity, and pretend to some profitableness of purpose 
in what they did. They would not ojoenly ask of their hearers 
— Did you think my sermon ingenious, or my language poetical ? 
They would early understand that they were not paid for being 
ingenious, nor called to be so, but to preach truth ; that if they 
happened to possess wit, eloquence, or originality, these would 
appear and be of service in due time, but were not to be con- 
tinually sought after or exhibited : and if it should happen that 
they had them not, they might still be serviceable pastors 
without them, 

Not so with the unhappy artist. No one expects any honest 
or useful work of him; but every one expects him to be 
ingenious. .Originality, dexterity, invention, imagination, 
every thing is asked of him except what alone is to be had for 
asking — honesty and sound work, and the due discharge of 
his function as a painter. What function ? asks the reader hi 
some surprise. lie may well ask ; for I suppose few painters 
have any idea what their function is, or even that they have 
any at all. 



436 MORALS AND EEUGION. 

And yet surely it is not so difficult to discover. The faculties, 
which when a man finds in himself, he resolves to he a painter, 
are, I suppose, intenseness of observation and faciHty of imita- 
tion. The man is ci'eated an observer and an imitator ; and his 
function is to convey knowledge to his fellow-men, of such 
things as cannot be taught otherwise than ocularly. For a long 
time this function remained a religious one : it was to impress 
upon the popular mind the reality of the objects of faith, and 
the truth of the histories of Scripture, by giving visible form to 
both. That function has now passed away, and none has as yet 
taken its place. The painter has no profession, no purpose. He is J 
an idler on the earth, chasing the shadows of his own fancies. ^ 

But he was never meant to be this. 

I do not know anything more ludicrous among the self-decep- 
tions of Avell-meaning people than their notion of patriotism, 
as requiring them to limit their efforts to the good of their own 
country ; — the notion that charity is a geographical virtue, and 
that what it is holy and righteous to do for people on one bank 
of a river, it is quite improper and unnatural to do for people 
on the other. It will be a wonderful thing, some day or other, 
for the Christian world to remember, that it went on thinking 
for two thousand years that neighbors were neighbors at 
Jerusalem, but not at Jericho ; a wonderful thing for us English 
to reflect, in after-years, how long it was before we could 
shake hands with anybody across the shallow salt wash, which 
the very chalk-dust of its two shoi^es whitens from Folkstone 
to Ambleteuse. 

It would be well if, instead of preaching continually about 
the doctrine of faith and good works, our clergymen would 
simply explain to their people a little what good works mean. 
There is not a chapter in all the book we profess to believe 



THE PERFECT ECONOMIST. 43'? 

more specially and directly wi'itten for England, tlian the 
second of Habakkuk, and I never in all ray life heard one of 
its pi-actical texts preached from. I suppose the clergymen 
are all afraid, and know that their flocks, while they will sit 
quite politely to hear syllogisms out of the epistle to the 
Romans, would get restive directly if they ever pressed a 
practical text home to them. But we should have no mercan- 
tile catastrophes, and no distressful pauperism, if we only read 
often, and took to heart, those plain words : " Yea, also, 
because he is a proud man, neither keepeth at home, who 
enlargeth his desire as hell, and cannot be satisfied, — Shall not 
all these take up a parable against him, and a taunting proverb 
against him, and say, ' "Woe to him that increaseth that which 
is not his : and to him that ladeth himself with thick clay.'* " L^* 
(What a glorious history, in one metaphor, of the life of a I 
man greedy of fortune.) " Woe to him that coveteth an evil 
covetousness that he may set his nest on high. Woe to him 
that buildeth a town with blood, and stablisheth a city by 
iniquity. Behold, is it not of the Lord of Hosts that the peo- 
ple shall labor in the very fire, and the people shall weary 
themselves for very vanity." j 

" She riseth while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her 
household, and a portion to her maidens. She maketh herself 
coverings of tapestry, her clothing is silk and purple. Strength 
and honor are in her clothing, and she shall rejoice in time to 
come." 

Now, you will observe that in this description of the perfect 
economist, or mistress of a household, there is a studied 
expression of the balanced division of her care between the 
two great objects of utility and sj^lendor ; in her right hand, 
food and flax, for life and clothing ; in her left hand, the pur- 
ple and the needle-work, for honor and for beauty. All per- 



433 MORALS AXD IlELIGIOX. 

feet housewifery or national economy is known Ly these twc 
divisions ; wherever either is wanting, the economy is impcr 
feet. If the motive of pomp prevails, and the care of the 
national economist is directed only to the accumulation of gold, 
and of pictures, and of silk and marble, you know at once that 
the time must soon come when all these treasures shall be 
scattered and blasted in national ruin. If, on the contrary, the 
element of utility prevails, and the nation disdains to occupy 
itself in any wise with the arts of beauty or delight, not only 
a certain quantity of its energy calculated for exercise in those 
arts alone must be entirely wasted, which is bad economy, but 
also the passions connected with the utilities of i>roperty become 
morbidly strong, and a mean lust of accumulation, merely for 
tlie sake of accumulation, -or even of labor, merely for the 
sake of labor, will banish at least tlie serenity and the morality 
of life, as completely, and perhaps more ignobly, than even 
the lavishness of pride, and the lightness of pleasure. And 
similarly, and much more visibly, in private and household eco- 
nomy, you may judge always of its perfectness by its fair 
balance between the use and the pleasure of its possessions. 

That modern science, wilh all its. additions to the comforts 
of life, and to.the fields of rational contemplation, has placed 
the existing races of mankind on a higher platforni than pre- 
ceded them, none can doubt for an instant ; and I believe the 
position in which we find ourselves is somewhat analogous to 
that of thouglitful and laborious youth succeeding a restless 
and heedless infancy. Xot long ago, it was said to me by one 
of the masters of modern sciences: "When men invented the 
locomotive, the child v\'as learning to go ; when they invented 
the telegi-aph, it was learning to sjicak." lie looked forward 
to the manhood of mankmd, as assuredly the nobler in propor- 
tion to the slo\vnet<s of its development. What might not be 



IIUHAN rROGEESS. 439 

expected from the prime and middle strength of tlie order of 
existence whose infancy had lasted six thousand years ? And, 
indeed, I think this the truest, as well as the most cheerino-, 
view that we can take of the world's history. Little progress 
has been made as yet. Base war, lying policy, thoughtless 
cruelty, senseless improvidence, — all things which, in nations, 
are analogous to the petulance, cunning, impatience, and care- 
lessness of infancy, — have been, up to this hour, as character- 
istic of mankind as they were in the earliest periods ; so that 
Ave must either be driven to doubt of human progress at all, 
or look upon it as in its very earhest stage. "Whether the 
opportunity is to be j)erniitted us to redeem the hours that we 
have lost ; whether He in whose sight a thousand years are as 
one day, has appointed us to be tried by the continued pos- 
session of the strange powers with which he has lately endowed 
us ; or whether the period of childhood and of probation are 
to cease together, and the youth of mankind is to be one 
which shall prevail over death, and bloom for ever in the midst 
of a new heaven and a new earth, are questions with which we 
have no concern. It is indeed right that Ave should look for, 
and hasten, so far as in us lies, the coming of the Day of God ; 
but not that we should check any human efforts by anticipa- 
tions of its approach. We shall hasten it best by endeavor- 
ing to work out the tasks that are appointed for us here ; and, 
therefore, reasoning as if the world were to continue under its 
existing dispensation, and the powers which have just been 
granted to us were to be continued through myriads of future 
ages. 

In the early ages of Christianity, there Avas little care taken 
to analyse character. One momentous question Avas heard 
over the Avhole world ; " Dost thou believe in the Lord Avith 
all thine heart?" There Avas but one diAdsion among men,— 



440 MORALS AND RELIGION. 

tlie great unatoueable division between the disciple and adver* 
sary. The love of Christ was all, and in all ; and in proportion 
to the nearness of their memory of His person and teaching, men 
understood the mfinity of the requirements of the moral law, 
and the manner in which it alone could be fulfilled. The early 
Christians felt that virtue, like sin, was a subtle universal thing, 
entering into every act and thought, appearmg outwardly in 
ten thousand diverse ways, diverse according to the separate 
framework of every heart in which it dwelt ; but one and the 
;eiame always in its j^roceeding from the love of God, as sin is 
one and the same in j^roceeding from hatred of God. And in 
their pure, early, and practical piety they saw that there was 
no need for codes of morality, or systems of metaphysics. 
Their vktue comprehended everything, entered into every- 
thing ; it was too vast and too spiritual to be defined ; but 
there was no need of its definition. For through faith, work- 
ing by love, they knew that all human excellence would be 
developed m due order ; but that, without fiiith, neither reason 
could define, nor efibrt reach, the lowest phase of Christian 
virtue. And therefore, when any of the Apostles have occa- 
sion to describe or enumerate any forms of vice or virtue by 
name, there is no attempt at system in their words. They 
use them hurriedly and energetically, heaping the thoughts 
one upon another, in order as far as possible to fill the reader's 
mind with a sense of infinity both of crime and of righteous- 
ness. Hear St. Paul describe sin: "Being filled with all 
unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, mali- 
ciousness ; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity ; 
whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boast- 
ers, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without 
understanding, covenant breakers, without natural afiection, 
implacable, unmerciful." There is evidently here an intense 
feeling of the universality of sin ; and in order to express it. 



THE TEACHING OF THE APOSTLES. 441 

the Apostle hurries his words confusedly together, httle caring 
about their order, as knowing all the vices to he indissolubly 
connected one with another. It would he utterly vain to 
endeavor to arrange his expressions as if they had been 
intended for the ground of any system, or to give any philo- 
sophical definition of the vices. So also hear him speaking of 
virtue : " Rejoice in the Lord. Let your moderation be \ 
known unto all men. Be careful for nothing, but in every- i 
thing let your requests be made known unto God; and what- 1 
soever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatso- 
ever thmgs are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever 
things are of good report, if there be any virtue, and if there be 
any jjraise, think on these things." Observe, he gives up all 
attempt at definition ; be leaves the dehnition to every man's 
heart, though he writes so as to mark the overflowing fulness 
of his own vision of virtue. And so it is in all writings of the 
Apostles ; their manner of exhortation, and the kind of con- 
duct they press, vary accordmg to the persons they address, 
and the feehng of the moment at which they write, and never 
show any attempt at logical precision. And, although the 
Avords of their Master are not thus irregularly uttered, but 
are weighed like fine gold, yet, even in His teaching, there is 
no detailed or organized system of moi'ality ; but the command 
only of that faith and love which were to embrace the whole 
being of man ; " On these two commandments hang all the 
law and the pro}>hets." Here and there an uicidental warning 
against this or that more dangerous form of vice or error, 
'' Take heed and beware of covetousness," " Beware of the 
leaven of the Pharisees," here and there a plain example of 
the meaning of Christian love, as in the parables of the Sama- 
ritan and the Prodigal, and His own perpetual example : these 
were the elements of Christ's constant teachings ; for the Bea- 
titudes, which are the only approximation to anything like a 



442 MOKALS AND KELIGION. 

systematic statement, belong to cTifierent conditions and cba 
racters of individual men, not to abstract virtues. And all 
early Christians taught in the same manner. They never 
cared to expound the nature of this or that virtue ; for they 
knew that the believer who had Christ, had all. Did he need 
fortitude ? Christ was his rock : Equity ? Christ was his 
righteousness : Holiness ? Christ was his sanctification : Li- 
berty ? Christ was his redemption : Temi^erance ? Christ 
was Ms ruler: Wisdom? Christ was his light: Fruitfulness ? j 
Christ was the truth : Charity ? Christ was love. 

Now, exactly in proportion as the Christian religion became 
less vital, and as the various corruptions which time and Satan 
brought into it were able to manifest themselves, the person 
and offices of Christ were less dwelt upon, and the virtues of 
Christians more. The Life of the Believer became in some 
degree separated from the Life of Christ ; and his virtue, 
instead of being a stream flowing forth from the throne of 
God, and descending upon the earth, began to be regarded 
by him as a pyramid upon earth, which he had to build up, 
step by step, that from the top of it he might reach the 
Heavens. 

I understand not the most dangerous, because most attrac- 
tive form of modern infidelity, which, pretending to exalt the 
beneficence of the Deity, degrades it into a reckless infinitude 
of mercy, and blind obliteration of tlie v.ork of sin ; and which 
does this chiefly by dwelling on the manifold appearances of 
God's kindness on the face of creation. Such kindness is 
indeed everywhere and always visible ; but not alone. Wiath 
and threatening are invariably rahigled with the love ; and in 
the utmost solitudes of nature, the existence of Hell seems to 
me as legibly declared by a thousand spiritual utterances, as 
that of Heaven. It is well for us to dwell with thankfulness 



THE PULPIT. 44A 

on the unfolding of the llower, and the falling of tie dew, and 
the sleep of the green fields in the sunsliine, but the blasted 
trunk, the barren reel:, the moaning of the bleak winds, the 
roar of the black, perilous, merciless whirlpools of the moun- 
tain streams, the solemn solitudes of moors and seas, the con- 
tinual fading of all beauty into darkness, and of all strength 
into dust, have these no language for us ? We may seek to 
escape their teachings by reasonings touching the good which 
is wrought out of all evil; but it is vain sophistry. The good 
succeeds to the evil as day succeeds the night, but so also the 
evil to the good. Gerizim and Ebal, bu'th and death, light 
and darkness, heaven and hell, divide the existence of man, 
and his Futurity. 

And because the thoughts of the choice we have to make 
between these two, ought to rule us continually, not so much 
in our own actions (for these should, for the most part, be 
governed by settled habit and principle) as ia our mamier 
of regarding the lives of other men, and our own responsibili- 
ties "with respect to them ; therefore, it seems to me that the 
healthiest state into which the human mind can be brought is 
that Mhich is capable of the greatest love, and the greatest awe. 

When the sermon is good we need not much concern o^^r- 
selves about the form of the pulpit. But sermons cannot 
always be good ; and I believe that the temj^er m which the 
congregation set themsehes to listen may be in some degree 
modified by their jjerception of fitness or unfitness, impressive- 
ness or vulgarity, in the disposition of the place appointed for 
the speaker, — not to the same degree, but somewhat in the 
same way, that they may be influenced by his own gestures or 
expression, irrespective of the sense of what he says, I believe 
therefore, in the first place, that pulpits ought never to be 
highly decorated ; the speaker is ai>t to look mean or diminu 



444 MORALS AND RELIGIOK, 

tive if the pulpit is either on a very large scale or covered with 
splendid ornament, and if the interest of the sermon should 
flag, the mind is instantly tempted to wander. I have observed 
that in almost all cathedrals, when the pulpits are peculiarly 
magnificent, sermons are not often preached from them ; hut 
rather, and especially if for any important purpose, from some 
temporary erection in other parts of the building : and though 
this may often be done because the architect has consulted the 
effect upon the eye more than the convenience of the ear in 
the jilacing of his larger pulpit, I think it also proceeds in 
some measure from a natural dislike in the preacher to match 
himself with the magnificence of the rostrum, lest the sermon 
should not be thought worthy of the place. Yet, this will 
rather hold of the colossal sculptures, and pyramids of fantas- 
tic tracery which encumber tlie pulpits of Flemish and German 
churches, than of the delicate mosaics and ivory-like caiwmg 
of the Romanesque basilicas, for when the form is kept simple, 
mucJi loveliness of color and costliness of work may be intro- 
duced, and yet the speaker not be thrown into the shade by 
them. 

But, in the second place, whatever ornaments Ave admit 
ought clearly to be of a chaste, grave, and noble kind ; and 
what furniture we employ, evidently more for the honoring of 
God's word than for the ease of the preacher. For there are 
two ways of regarding a sermon, either as a human composi- 
tion, or a Divine message. If we look upon it entirely as the 
first, and require our clergymen to finish it with their utmost 
care and learning, for our better delight Avhether of ear or 
intellect, we shall necessarily be led to expect much formality 
and stateliness in its delivery, and to think that all is not Avell 
if the pulpit have not a golden fringe round it, and a goodly 
cushion in front of it, and if the sermon be not fiiirly written 
in a bhuk book, to be smoothed upon the cushion in a majes- 



TUB PULPIT. 445 

tic manner before beginning ; all this we shall duly come to 
expect : but we shall at the same time consider the treatise 
thus prepared as something to which it is our duty to listen 
without restlessness for half an hour or three quarters, but 
which, when that duty has been decorously performed, we 
may dismiss from our minds in happy confidence of being pro- 
vided with another when next it shall be necessary. But if 
once we begin to regard the preacher, whatever his faults, as 
a man sent with a message to us, which it is a matter of life or 
death whether we hear or refuse ; if we look upon him as set 
in charge over many sj^irits in danger of ruin, and having 
allowed to him but an hour or two in the seven days to speak 
to them ; if we make some endeavor to conceive how precious 
these hours ought to be to him, a small vantage on the side of 
God after his flock have been exposed for six days together to 
the full weight of the world's temptation, and he has been 
forced to watch the thorn and the thistle springing- in their hearts, 
and to see what wheat had been scattered there snatched fi-om 
the wayside by this wUd bird and the other, and at last, when 
breathless and weary with the week's labor they give him 
this interval of imperfect and languid hearing, he has but 
thirty minutes to get at the separate hearts of a thousand men, 
to convince them of all their weaknesses, to shame them for 
all their sins, to warn them of all their dangers, to try by this 
way and that to stir the hard fastenings of those doors where 
the Master himself has stood and knocked yet none opened, and 
to call at the openings of those dark streets where Wisdom 
herself hath stretched forth her hands and no man regarded, — 
thirty minutes to raise the dead in, — let us but once under- 
stand and feel this, and we shall look Avith changed eyes upon 
that frippery of gay furniture about the place from which the 
message of judgment must be delivered, which either breathes 
ujjon the dry bones that they may live, or, if ineffectual, remains 



446 MOKALS AND RELIGION. 

recorded in condemnation, jierliaps against the utterer and 
listener alike, but assuredly against one of tlieni. "We shall not 
so easily bear with the silk and gold upon the seat of judgment, 
iior with ornament of oratory in the mouth of the messenger ; 
we shall wish that his words may be simple, even when they 
are sweetest, and the place from which he speaks like a marble 
rock in the desert, about Ayhich the people have gathered in 
their thirst. 

MODERN EDUCATION. 

By a large body of the people of England and of Europe a 
man is called educated if he can write Latin verses and con- 
strue a Greek chorus. By some few more enlightened per- 
sons it is confessed that the construction of hexameters is not 
in itself an important end of human existence ; but they say, 
that the general discipline which a course of classical reading 
gives to the intellectual powers, is the final object of our scho- 
lastical institutions. 

But it seems to me, there is no small error even m this last 
and more j^hilosophical theory. I believe, that what it is most 
honorable to know, it is also most i:)rofitable to learn ; and 
that the science which it is the highest power to possess, it is 
also the best exercise to acquire. 

And if this be so, the question as to what should be the 
material of education, becomes singularly simplified. It might 
be matter of dispute what processes have the greatest eflect 
in developing the intellect ; but it can hardly be disputed 
what facts it is most advisable that a man entering into life 
Bhould accurately know. 

I believe, in brief, that he ought to knoAV three things : 

First. Where he is. 

Secondly. Where he is going. 



SEP -2 15^7 



MODERX EDUCATION, 447 

, Thirdly. What he had best do under those circnnistances. 

First. Where h^ is. — That is to say, ^vhat sort of a world 
he has got into ; how large it is; what kind of creatures live 
in it, and how ; what it is made of, and what may be made 
of it. 

Secondly. Where he is going. — That is to say, what chances 
or reports there are of any other world besides this ; what 
seems to be the nature of that other world ; and whether, for 
information. I'especting it, he had better consult the Bible, 
Koran, or Cil&noil of Trent. 

Thirdly. What^ he had best do under those circiunstances. 
— That is to say, Avhat kind of faculties he possesses ; what are 
the present state and wants of mankind ; what is his place in 
society ; and what are the readiest means in his power of 
attaining happiness and difft^sing it. The man who knows 
these things, and who has had his Avill so subdued in the 
learning them, that he is ready to do what he knows he 
ought, I should call educated; and the man Avho knows 
them not, uneducated, though he could talk all the tongues 
of Babel. 

Our present European system of so-called education ignores, 
or despises, not one, nor the other, but all the three, of these 
great branches of human knowledge. 

First : It despises Natural Histoiy. — Until within the last 
year or two, the instruction in the physical sciences given at 
Oxford consisted of a course of twelve or fourteen lectures on 
the Elements of Mechanics or Pneumatics, and permission to 
ride out to ShotoA'er with the Professor of Geology. I do not 
know the siiecialities of the system pursued in the academies 
of the Continent ; but their practical result is, that unless a 
man's natural instincts urge him to the pursuit of the physi- 
cal sciences too strongly o be resisted, he enters into life 
utterly ignorant of them. I cannot, within my present limits, 



448 MORALS AND rvELIG^ON. 

even so much as count the various du-ections in which this 
ignorance does evil. But the main mischief of it is, that it 
leaves the greater number of men without the natural food 
which God intended for their intellects. For one man who is 
fitted for the study of words, fifty are fitted for the study of 
things, and were intended to have a perpetual, simple, and 
religious delight in watching the processes, or admiring the 
creatures, of the natural universe. Deprived of this source of 
joleasure, notMng is left to them but ambition or dissipation ; 
and the vices of the upper classes of Europe are, I believe, 
chiefly to be attributed to this single cause. 

Secondly: It despises Religion. — I do not say it despisjs 
" Theology," that is to say, talk about God. But it despises 
" Religion ;" that is to say, the " bindmg " or training to 
God's service. There is much talk and much teaching in all 
our academies, of which the effect is not to bind, but to loosen, 
the elements of rehgious faith. Of the ten or twelve young 
men who, at Oxford, were my especial friends, who sat with 
me under the same lectures on Divinity, or were punished with 
me for missing lecture by being sent to evening prayers, 
four are now zealous Romanists, a large average out of 
twelve ; and while thus our own universities profess to teach 
Protestantism, and do not, the universities on the Continent 
profess to teach Romanism, and do not, — sending forth only 
rebels and infidels. During long residence on the Continent, 
I do not remember meeting with above two or three young 
men, who either believed in revelation, or had the grace to 
hesitate in the assertion of their infidelity. 

Whence, it seems to me, we may gather one of two things ; 
either that there is nothing in any European form of religion 
so reasonable or ascertained, as that it can be taught securely 
to our youth, or fastened in their minds by any rivets of proof 
which they shall not be able to loosen the moment they begin 



MODERN" EDUCATIOJT. 44S 

to think ; oi* else, that no means are taken to train them in 
such demonstrable creeds. 

It seems to me the duty of a rational nation to ascertain 
(and to be at some pains in the matter) which of these suppo- 
sitions is true ; and, if indeed no proof can be given of any 
supernatural fact, or Divine doctrine, stronger than a youth 
just out of his teens can overthrow in the first stirrings 
of serious thought, to confess this boldly ; to get rid of the 
expense of an Establishment, and the hypocrisy of a Liturgy ; 
to exhibit its cathedrals as curious memorials of a bygone 
superstition, and, abandoning all thoughts of the next world, 
to set itself to make the best it can of this. 

But if, on the other hand, there does exist any evidence by 
which the probabihty of certain religious facts may be shown, 
as clearly, even, as the probabilities of thuigs not absolutely 
ascertained in astronomical or geological science, let this evi- 
dence be set before all our youth so distinctly, and the facts 
for which it appears inculcated upon them so steadily, that 
although it may be possible for the evil conduct of after life to 
efface, or for its earnest and protracted meditation to modify, 
the impressions of early years, it may not be possible for our 
young men, the instant they emerge from their academies, to 
scatter themselves like a flock of wild fowl risen out of a marsh, 
and drift away on every irregular wind of heresy and apostasy. 

Lastly. Our System of European education despises politics. 
— That is to say, the science of the relations and duties of 
men to each other. One would imagine, indeed, by a glance at 
the state of the world, that there was no such science. And, 
indeed, it is one still in its infancy. 

It implies, in its full sense, the knowledge of the operations 
of the virtues and vices of men upon themselves and society ; 
the understanding of the ranks and offices of their intellectual 
and bodily powers in their various adaptations to art, science, 



450 MOKALS -VND EELIGIOK". 

and industry ; the understanding of the proper offices of art, 
science, and labor themselves, as well as of the foundations 
of jurisprudence, and broad principles of commerce ; all this 
being coupled with practical knowledge of the present state 
and wants of mankind. 

What, it will be said, and is all this to be taught to school- 
boys ? No ; but the first elements of it, all that are necessary 
to be known by an individual ha order to his acting wisely in 
any station of life might be taught, not only to every school- 
boy, but to every peasant. The impossibility of equaUty 
among men ; the good which arises from their inequality ; the 
comjiensating circumstances in different states and fortunes ; 
the honorablcness of every man who is \\oi'tliily filling his 
ai:)15oiuted place in society, however humble ; the proper rela- 
tions of poor and rich, governor and governed ; the nature 
of wealth, and mode of its circulation ; the difference between 
productive and unproductive labor ; the relation of the pro- 
ducts of the mind and hand ; the true value of works of the 
higher arts, and the possible amount of their production ; the 
meaning of " Civilization," its advantages and dangers ; the 
meaning of the term "Refinement;" the possibilities of pos- 
sessing refinement in a low station, and of losing it in a high 
one ; and, above all, the significance of almost every act of a 
man's daily life, in its ultimate operation upon himself and 
othei's ; — all this might be, and ought to be, taught to every 
boy in the Kingdom, so completely, tliat it should be just as 
impossible to introduce an absurd or licentious doctrine among 
our adult population, as a new version of the multiplication 
table. Nor am I altogether without hope that some day it 
may enter into the heads of the tutors of our schools to try 
whether it is not as easy to make an Eton boy's mind as sensi- 
tive to falseness in policy, as his ear is at present to falseness in 
prosody. 



MODERN EDUCATION. 451 

I know that this is much to hope. That English niinister3 
of reUgion should ever come to desire rather to make a youth 
acquainted with the powers of Nature and of God, than with 
the powers of Greek particles ; that they should ever think it 
more useful to show him how the great universe rolls upon its 
course in heaven, than how the syllables are fitted in a tragic 
metre ; that they should hold it more advisable for him to be 
fixed in the principles of religion than in those of syntax ; or, 
finally, that they should ever come to apprehend that a youth 
likely to go straight out of college into parliament, might not 
unadvisably knoAV as much of the Peninsular as of the Pelo- 
ponuesian War, and be as well acquainted with the state of 
Modern Italy as of old Etruria ; — all this, however unreasona 
bly, I do hope, and mean to work for. For though I have not 
yet abandoned all expectation of a better world than this, I 
believe this in which we live is not so good as it might be. I 
know there are many people who suppose French revolutions, 
Italian insurrections, Cafii-e wars, ^nd such other scenic efforts 
of modern policy, to be among the normal conditions of huma- 
nity. I know there are many who thmk the atmosphere of 
rapine, rebellion, and misery which wraps the lower orders of 
Euiope more closely every day, is as natural a phenomenon as a 
hot summer. But God forbid ! There ai-e ills which flesh is heir 
to and troubles to which man is born ; but the troubles which he 
is born to are as sparks which fly upward, not as flames burn- 
ing to the nethermost Hell. The poor we must have with us 
always, and sorrow is inseparable from any hour of life; but 
we may make their poverty such as shall inherit the earth, 
and the sorrow, such as shall be hallowed by the hand of the 
Comforter, with everlasting comfort. We can, if we will but 
shake ofl"this lethargy and dreaming tliat is upon us, and take 
the pains to think and act like men, we can, I say, make king- 
doms to be like well governed households, in A\hich, indeed, 



452 MORALS AND EELIGION. 

\^liUe no care or kindness can jjrevent occasional heart- burn 
ings, nor any foresight or piety anticipate all the vicissitudes 
of fortune, or avert every stroke of calamity, yet the unity of 
their affection and fellowship remains unbroken, and their dis- 
tress is neither embittered by division, prolonged by impru- 
dence, nor darkened by dishonor. 



TUK E2It>. 



